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Category: Python

Python + knitr

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke shows how to integrate Python code into knitr:

One of the nifty things about using R is that you can use it for many different purposes and even other languages!

If you want to use Python in your knitr docs or the newish RStudio R notebook functionality, you might encounter some fiddliness getting all the moving parts running on Windows. This is a quick knitr Python Windows setup checklist to make sure you don’t miss any important steps.

Between knitr, Zeppelin, and Jupyter, you should be able to find a cross-compatible notebook which works for you.

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Understanding Naive Bayes

Published 2016-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Ahmet Taspinar explains the Naive Bayes classificiation algorithm and writes Python code to implement it:

Within Machine Learning many tasks are – or can be reformulated as – classification tasks.

In classification tasks we are trying to produce a model which can give the correlation between the input data $X$ and the class $C$ each input belongs to. This model is formed with the feature-values of the input-data. For example, the dataset contains datapoints belonging to the classes Apples, Pears and Oranges and based on the features of the datapoints (weight, color, size etc) we are trying to predict the class.

Ahmet has his entire post saved as a Jupyter notebook.

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Data Science Languages

Published 2016-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Alessandro Piva provides preliminary metrics on language usage among self-described data scientists:

Programming is one of the five main competence areas at the base of the skill set for a Data Scientist, even if is not the most relevant in term of expertise (see What is the right mix of competences for Data Scientists?). Considering the results of the survey, that involved more than 200 Data Scientist worldwide until today, there isn’t a prevailing choice among the programming languages used during the data science’s activities. However, the choice appears to be addressed mainly to a limited set of alternatives: almost 96% of respondents affirm to use at least one of R, SQL or Python.

These results don’t surprise me much.  R has slightly more traction than Python, but the percentage of people using both is likely to increase.  SQL, meanwhile, is vital for getting data, and as we’re seeing in the Hadoop space, as data platform products get more mature, they tend to gravitate toward a SQL or SQL-like language.  Cf. Hive, Spark SQL, Phoenix, etc.

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Build A Python App Which Connects To SQL Server

Published 2016-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones walks through a Python tutorial:

However, there were other errors, which I suspect are related to Python 2.7 v Pyhton 3.5. Rather than solve those, I went on to the columnstore demo. In this, you create a table with 5mm rows and then run a query against it from Python. I did that, then created the columnstore index, then ran it again. The results are below.

And within an hour or so of starting, Steve has hit the 2.x vs 3.x mess in Python.

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Python Support In Azure Data Lake

Published 2016-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Saveen Reddy announces that Python is now a first-tier language in the Azure Data Lake:

This week, were are now making announcing even more support for Python. As of today Python is now a first-class language supported by our management SDKs. This enables you to develop applications or automate the Data Lake services. Check out or Getting Started articles that now include many python samples

Saveen has a Jupyter notebook which demonstrates Python in Azure Data Lake Store.

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Powershell And Python

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad mixes two powerful scripting languages:

For this section we previously installed the python module pyodbc which is needed to connect via ODBC to any SQL Server on the network giving the proper authentication method.

The following sample code can be found this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/python-ubuntu

This is probably more useful in larger shops with multiple operations personnel covering different domains, but it’s nice to know that both languages play nice.

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Word Clouds In Python

Published 2016-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Tharp shows how to generate a word cloud using Python:

Every week, someone on Reddit posts a “word cloud” on all of the NFL team’s subreddits.  These word clouds show the most used words on that subreddit for the week (the larger the word, the more it was used).  These word plots are always really fascinating to me, so I wanted to try to make some for myself.  In this tutorial, we’ll be making the following word cloud from my board game stats twitter feed, @BGGStats

Looks like the implementation is fairly straightforward, so check it out.

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More NFL Alerts

Published 2016-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Tharp has an update to her NFL Alerts Python script:

Next, I wanted to make the alerts be a little more meaningful.  The alert for a scoring play was already pretty good – it sends something like: BUF – Q4 – TD – J.Boykin 4 yd. pass from C.Jones (pass failed) Drive: 8 plays, 83 yards in 1:08 IND (19) at BUF (18).  This is good, and in fact it is what I want the rest of the alerts to look like.  However, I’d like the subject of the email to have the name of the team that scored (before it was just ‘Scoring Play’).

To do that, I needed to find out how to get the name of the scoring team.  This was a little tricky because the documentation for the nflgame library, though pretty good, doesn’t give a good indication on how to find this.

Read on for more details, including specifics on turnovers and penalties.

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Azure ML To Python

Published 2016-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Koos van Strien “graduates” from Azure ML into Python:

Python is often used in conjunction with the scikit-learn collection of libraries. The most important libraries used for ML in Python are grouped inside a distribution called Anaconda. This is the distribution that’s also used inside Azure ML1. Besides Python and scikit-learn, Anaconda contains all kinds of Data Science-oriented packages. It’s a good idea to install Anaconda as a distribution and use Jupyter (formerly IPython) as development environment: Anaconda gives you almost the same environment on your local machine as your code will run in once in Azure ML. Jupyter gives you a nice way to keep code (in Python) and write / document (in Markdown) together.

Anaconda can be downloaded from https://www.continuum.io/downloads.

If you’re going down this path, Anaconda is absolutely a great choice.

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