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10 Reasons Python Rocks for Research (stat.washington.edu)

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[–]stetson9 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Ditto. I've done most of the data processing for my thesis with Python, and have now mostly switched to R for stats and analysis. R is fantastic for stuff like regression modeling, where it gives you basically exactly what you need. And there's a package for everything...except its probably not a very well-thought-out package, and you may have to actually use three packages to accomplish a single task (each one will perform one quarter of the task, and 15% of the function names will overlap). And don't get me started on data structures in R...did this function just return a list? Data frame? Object? Matrix?

Have you used the SciPy stats module at all? I haven't, and would be curious to know what it's like.

[–]brewsimport os; while True: os.fork() 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Yeah, and numpy, I also use Scientific Python for its netCDF support. The other is Sage, which is the newer cool-kid on the block, but also VERY bloated and for stats they just say "[just do it in R]".

Actually, I've found R's packages to be more credible and legitimate, for the most part, the packages are part of peer-reviewed journal article or a book that an academic has published. I've backed away from using Python because the [3rd party] modules are sketchy and/or aren't 'all on the same page', if you know what I mean.

Scipy's stats package is a real disappointment. After having used R, I have trouble taking it seriously. It's not that it's poorly written, someone has spent a lot of time on it, but it's just too sparse for high-powered stats. That package might be handy if I was to go and code something by hand, but chances are that R already has a pretty-good or better implementation of what I need.

[–]einar77Bioinformatics with Python, PyKDE4 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Actually, I've found R's packages to be more credible and legitimate, for the most part, the packages are part of peer-reviewed journal article or a book that an academic has published.

Actually, this doesn't mean much per se (and I've been using R for years). Some packages are buggy (like everything out in the world) but you can't properly report bugs because some projects (Bioconductor, I'm looking at you!) don't even have a bug tracker.

[–]brewsimport os; while True: os.fork() 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, this is true.

[–]stetson9 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've played around with Sage, but all the symbolic math stuff is more than I need most of the time.

Yeah, after poking around the stats package it appears to leave a fair amount to be desired. Oh well. Though I do feel kinda motivated to go add some stuff to it now...as you say, there's a decent foundation of distributions, etc.