I’m going to keep this post brief so that the steps are clear and concise. The reason for writing this post is that I wanted to get iPython Notebook, a powerful tool for data analysis, to run with plotting and pandas in Mac OS X 10.8. When I initially tried to get this running, I would encounter errors where there were conflicts between 32-bit and 64-bit installations of different packages. After a good deal of trial and error, I found the following steps resulted in a full iPython Notebook environment with Pandas and Matplotlib functioning flawlessly.
Tag Archives: statistics
Starting Quirks with Pandas from an R Junkie
Okay, okay, the title might be a little sensationalised. I have been using the R statistics package for processing the results of evolutionary runs since beginning my PhD 2 years ago. In that time, I have become familiar with the basic process to importing data, performing basic population statistics, mean, confidence intervals, etc, and plotting using ggplot. I’ve always felt that I could streamline the process though as I perform a great deal of preprocessing using Python. This typically involves combining multiple replicate runs into one data file and possibly even doing some basic statistics using the built-in functionality of Python.
Escaping the Spreadsheet Mentality: Start with the Right Data Format
Growing up on a healthy diet of Microsoft Office products, I am well versed in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. As I have transitioned into the research world, these products still have their place, however, I sometimes find that the habits I developed for organizing data doesn’t necessarily transfer to statistical analysis. Recently, I ran into a situation where I was evaluating the performance of solutions in multiple different environments. Organizing this data appeared straightforward to me at first, I would simply group the different environments into one row grouped by the id of the individual. My data then looked something like this:
Generation | Environment 1 | Environment 2 | Environment 3 |
---|---|---|---|
1 | 10.3 | 12.1 | 8.2 |
2 | 14.1 | 10.2 | 7.4 |
3 | 8.6 | 13.4 | 10.2 |
4 | 9.8 | 11.2 | 9.3 |