Book Image

Scientific Computing with Scala

By : Vytautas Jancauskas
Book Image

Scientific Computing with Scala

By: Vytautas Jancauskas

Overview of this book

Scala is a statically typed, Java Virtual Machine (JVM)-based language with strong support for functional programming. There exist libraries for Scala that cover a range of common scientific computing tasks – from linear algebra and numerical algorithms to convenient and safe parallelization to powerful plotting facilities. Learning to use these to perform common scientific tasks will allow you to write programs that are both fast and easy to write and maintain. We will start by discussing the advantages of using Scala over other scientific computing platforms. You will discover Scala packages that provide the functionality you have come to expect when writing scientific software. We will explore using Scala's Breeze library for linear algebra, optimization, and signal processing. We will then proceed to the Saddle library for data analysis. If you have experience in R or with Python's popular pandas library you will learn how to translate those skills to Saddle. If you are new to data analysis, you will learn basic concepts of Saddle as well. Well will explore the numerical computing environment called ScalaLab. It comes bundled with a lot of scientific software readily available. We will use it for interactive computing, data analysis, and visualization. In the following chapters, we will explore using Scala's powerful parallel collections for safe and convenient parallel programming. Topics such as the Akka concurrency framework will be covered. Finally, you will learn about multivariate data visualization and how to produce professional-looking plots in Scala easily. After reading the book, you should have more than enough information on how to start using Scala as your scientific computing platform
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Scientific Computing with Scala
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Other scientific software


Here, we include packages that don't really fit in either of the preceding categories. As in the other sections, we only provide packages that seem the most promising at the time of writing. The idea is to give the reader a sense of what's available in this regard in Scala.

FACTORIE

FACTORIE is a toolkit for deployable probabilistic modeling. It allows you to create probabilistic graphical models and perform inference. There are many applications for probabilistic graphical modeling including speech recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, and applications in bioinformatics. For more information on FACTORIE, refer to the following website

http://factorie.cs.umass.edu/

Cassovary

Cassovary is a large graph processing toolkit developed by Twitter. While there are other graph libraries for Scala, Cassovary allows one to work with graphs consisting of billions of vertices and edges in an efficient way. It powers the underlying Twitter infrastructure. Here is the link for Cassovary:

https://github.com/twitter/cassovary

Figaro

Figaro is a probabilistic programming language. It supports the development of rich probabilistic models and provides reasoning algorithms. These can be used to draw conclusions from evidence. Probabilistic reasoning is one of the foundational technologies behind machine learning. It has been used for stock price prediction, recommendation systems, image detection, and other machine learning tasks. For more information on Figaro, visit:

https://github.com/p2t2/figaro