Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Cyrille Rossant
Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Cyrille Rossant

Overview of this book

Python is one of the leading open source platforms for data science and numerical computing. IPython and the associated Jupyter Notebook offer efficient interfaces to Python for data analysis and interactive visualization, and they constitute an ideal gateway to the platform. IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook, Second Edition contains many ready-to-use, focused recipes for high-performance scientific computing and data analysis, from the latest IPython/Jupyter features to the most advanced tricks, to help you write better and faster code. You will apply these state-of-the-art methods to various real-world examples, illustrating topics in applied mathematics, scientific modeling, and machine learning. The first part of the book covers programming techniques: code quality and reproducibility, code optimization, high-performance computing through just-in-time compilation, parallel computing, and graphics card programming. The second part tackles data science, statistics, machine learning, signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and pure and applied mathematics.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization CookbookSecond Edition
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Mathematical optimization is a wide area of applied mathematics. It consists of finding the best solution to a given problem. Many real-world problems can be expressed in an optimization framework. What is the shortest path on the road from point A to point B? What is the best strategy to solve a puzzle? What is the most energy-efficient shape of a car (automotive aerodynamics)? Mathematical optimization is relevant in many domains including engineering, economics, finance, operations research, image processing, data analysis, and others.

Mathematically, an optimization problem consists of finding the maximum or minimum value of a function. We sometimes use the terms continuous optimization or discrete optimization, according to whether the function variable is real-valued or discrete.

In this chapter, we will focus on numerical methods for solving continuous optimization problems. Many optimization algorithms are implemented in the scipy.optimize module. We will come across...