Caleb Madrigal

Programming, Hacking, Math, and Art

  

First look at Pylab/Matplotlib

Since I've been getting into Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence recently, I've been looking at various computing environments recently. Some of the contenders are:

  • MATLAB - The traditional software stack for doing machine learning and statistical analysis
  • GNU Octave - An open-source MATLAB clone.
  • R - An open source clone of a statistical computing environment called S.
  • Julia - A language for doing statistical analysis. The goals are to compete with Matlab and R.
  • Matplotlib/Pylab/SciPy/NumPy - see below

Of these, I've tried Octave and Matplotlib. Matplotlib/Pylab is the software stack consisting of:

  • IPython - an interactive REPL for Python with things like tab completion
  • Matplotlib - a graphical plotting library
  • NumPy - a matrix library
  • SciPy - a collection of scientific and mathematical algorithms

I've only played with Matplotlib/Pylab a little bit, but I like what I've seen so far. Here's 2 quick examples:

1. Displaying a Histogram of a gaussian distribution

First, make sure to run from matplotlib import * and from numpy import *

Gaussian Histogram

(I love how there are bell-shaped curves in the array representation of the histogram) :)

2. Plotting a function (y=x^2+10):

Matplotlib Quadratic

Also, there is a really good video from PyCon 2012 on Matplotlib: Plotting with Matplotlib.

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