Book Image

Julia for Data Science

By : Anshul Joshi
2 (1)
Book Image

Julia for Data Science

2 (1)
By: Anshul Joshi

Overview of this book

Julia is a fast and high performing language that's perfectly suited to data science with a mature package ecosystem and is now feature complete. It is a good tool for a data science practitioner. There was a famous post at Harvard Business Review that Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century. (https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century). This book will help you get familiarised with Julia's rich ecosystem, which is continuously evolving, allowing you to stay on top of your game. This book contains the essentials of data science and gives a high-level overview of advanced statistics and techniques. You will dive in and will work on generating insights by performing inferential statistics, and will reveal hidden patterns and trends using data mining. This has the practical coverage of statistics and machine learning. You will develop knowledge to build statistical models and machine learning systems in Julia with attractive visualizations. You will then delve into the world of Deep learning in Julia and will understand the framework, Mocha.jl with which you can create artificial neural networks and implement deep learning. This book addresses the challenges of real-world data science problems, including data cleaning, data preparation, inferential statistics, statistical modeling, building high-performance machine learning systems and creating effective visualizations using Julia.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Julia for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 1. The Groundwork – Julia's Environment

Julia is a fairly young programming language. In 2009, three developers (Stefan Karpinski, Jeff Bezanson, and Viral Shah) at MIT in the Applied Computing group under the supervision of Prof. Alan Edelman started working on a project that lead to Julia. In February 2012, Julia was presented publicly and became open source. The source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia). The source of the registered packages can also be found on GitHub. Currently, all four of the initial creators, along with developers from around the world, actively contribute to Julia.

Note

The current release is 0.4 and is still away from its 1.0 release candidate.

Based on solid principles, its popularity is steadily increasing in the field of scientific computing, data science, and high-performance computing.

This chapter will guide you through the download and installation of all the necessary components of Julia. This chapter covers the following topics:

  • How is Julia different?

  • Setting up Julia's environment.

  • Using Julia's shell and REPL.

  • Using Jupyter notebooks

  • Package management

  • Parallel computation

  • Multiple dispatch

  • Language interoperability

Traditionally, the scientific community has used slower dynamic languages to build their applications, although they have required the highest computing performance. Domain experts who had experience with programming, but were not generally seasoned developers, always preferred dynamic languages over statically typed languages.