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

Chapter 8. Scientific Plotting with Scala

Plotting is often the most convenient and quickest way of analyzing data. Visualizing your data can give you all sorts of insights into what you are dealing with. Common plots, such as histograms, scatter plots, bar plots, and box-and-whisker plots, are often invaluable tools for exploratory statistical analysis.

In this chapter, we will explore several options for dealing with plotting in Scala. We will see how to do the most basic plots with all of them. There are many popular libraries for plotting. Examples include matplotlib, seaborn for Python, and ggplot2 for the R programming language. There aren't as many options for Scala as there are for languages that have been around longer. Those that are available are not as powerful as the ones we mentioned, but they certainly are solid options to get you started. We will look at several good ones you can use.

First of all, there is the JFreeChart library for Java. This is not Scala-specific, and this...