Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing

By : Francisco J. Blanco-Silva
Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing

By: Francisco J. Blanco-Silva

Overview of this book

<p>It's essential to incorporate workflow data and code from various sources in order to create fast and effective algorithms to solve complex problems in science and engineering. Data is coming at us faster, dirtier, and at an ever increasing rate. There is no need to employ difficult-to-maintain code, or expensive mathematical engines to solve your numerical computations anymore. SciPy guarantees fast, accurate, and easy-to-code solutions to your numerical and scientific computing applications.<br /><br />"Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing" unveils secrets to some of the most critical mathematical and scientific computing problems and will play an instrumental role in supporting your research. The book will teach you how to quickly and efficiently use different modules and routines from the SciPy library to cover the vast scope of numerical mathematics with its simplistic practical approach that's easy to follow.<br /><br />The book starts with a brief description of the SciPy libraries, showing practical demonstrations for acquiring and installing them on your system. This is followed by the second chapter which is a fun and fast-paced primer to array creation, manipulation, and problem-solving based on these techniques.<br /><br />The rest of the chapters describe the use of all different modules and routines from the SciPy libraries, through the scope of different branches of numerical mathematics. Each big field is represented: numerical analysis, linear algebra, statistics, signal processing, and computational geometry. And for each of these fields all possibilities are illustrated with clear syntax, and plenty of examples. The book then presents combinations of all these techniques to the solution of research problems in real-life scenarios for different sciences or engineering — from image compression, biological classification of species, control theory, design of wings, to structural analysis of oxides.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Descriptive statistics


We often require the analysis of data in which certain features are grouped in different regions, each with different sizes, values, shapes, and so on. The scipy.ndimage.measurements submodule has the right tools for this task, and the best way to illustrate the capabilities of the module is by means of an exhaustive examples. For example, for binary images of zeros and ones, it is possible to label each blob (areas of contiguous pixels with value one) and obtain the number of these with the label command. If we desire to obtain the center of mass of the blobs, we may do so with the center_of_mass command. We may see these operations in action once again in the application to obtaining the structural model of oxides in next chapter.

For nonbinary data, the scipy.ndimage.measurements submodule provides with the usual basic statistical measurements (value and location of extreme values, mean, standard deviation, sum, variance, histogram, and so on).

For more advanced...