{"id":118,"date":"2013-11-11T15:38:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T15:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/?p=118"},"modified":"2013-11-11T15:38:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T15:38:39","slug":"pydata-nyc-nov-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/pydata-nyc-nov-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"PyData NYC Nov. 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pydata.org\/nyc2013\/schedule\/\">PyData 2013 NYC<\/a> was a pretty great time. \u00a0It is always fun to meet folks as passionate about your favorite tools as you are. \u00a0There&#8217;s probably too much to really mention, but I definitely want to throw together a few of my thoughts and ideas. \u00a0Without futher ado &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Some of the talks I went to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Travis talking about <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.continuum.io\/conda\/index.html\">conda<\/a>\u00a0(and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.continuum.io\/blog\/conda\">blog post<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.continuum.io\/blog\/new-advances-in-conda\">blog post<\/a>). \u00a0While I&#8217;m an admitted gentoo fanboy (actually, I don&#8217;t fan at all; I just use it), having a lighter weight option for the Python eco-system (across *nix (including OSX) and Windows) is really nice. \u00a0If I would have realized a few things about conda last year (I&#8217;m not sure how far along it was, at the right time point), I might have used it for some internal code deployment.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hilpisch.com\/#\/\">Yves<\/a> talking about <a href=\"http:\/\/hilpisch.com\/YH_Performance_Python_Slides.html#\/\">Performance Python<\/a>\u00a0(and an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wakari.io\/sharing\/bundle\/yves\/YH_Performance_Python_Slides\">ipython notebook of the same<\/a>; some other talk material is at his website). \u00a0Not much here was new to me &#8212;\u00a0<em>but<\/em> &#8212; being reminded of the fundamentals and low-hanging fruit is always good.<\/li>\n<li>Dan Blanchard talking about <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/EducationalTestingService\/skll\">skll<\/a>\u00a0(and a link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/DanielBlanchard2\/simple-machine-learning-with-skll\">talk<\/a>). \u00a0skll seems to take care of several procedural meta-steps in scikit-learn programs: \u00a0train\/test\/CV splits and model parameter grid searches.<\/li>\n<li>Thomas Wiecki talking about <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/pymc-devs\/pymc\/tree\/pymc3\">pymc3<\/a>\u00a0(most of the talk material shows up in the pymc3 docs; he also mentioned <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/quantopian\/zipline\">Quantopian&#8217;s zipline project<\/a>\u00a0and he has <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/twiecki\">a few interesting git repos<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>Peter Wang&#8217;s keynote was insightful, thought provoking, and not the typical painful keynote that has you checking email the whole time. \u00a0He mentioned a <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/apps\/pubs\/default.aspx?id=64537\">Jim Gray paper<\/a>\u00a0that seems worthwhile. \u00a0By reputation, everything Jim Gray did was worthwhile. \u00a0[Gray disappeared while sailing a few years back.]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A thought that I&#8217;ve had over the years and that I&#8217;d love to see come to (ongoing) completion is some sort of CI job (continuous integration) that grabs the main Python learning systems, builds them, and runs [some|many|most|all] of the learning algorithms on synthetic, random, and\/or standard (UCI, kaggle, etc.) datasets. \u00a0Of course, we would measure resource usage (time\/memory) and error rates. \u00a0While the time performance is what would really get most people interested (and also cause the most dissent: \u00a0you weren&#8217;t fair to XYZ), I&#8217;m more interested in verifying that random forest in scikit-learn and orange give marginally similar results. \u00a0Throwing in some R and matlab options would give some comparison to the outside world, as well.<\/p>\n<p>Doing these comparisons in the right way has a number of difficulties, as I discussed with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.astro.washington.edu\/users\/vanderplas\/\">Jake VanderPlas<\/a>. \u00a0In just a few minutes, we were worried about data format differences (less important for numpy based alternatives, Orange uses its own ExampleTable &#8212; which you can convert to\/from numpy arrays), default and hard-coded parameters (possibly not being able to compare equivalent models), and social issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PyData 2013 NYC was a pretty great time. \u00a0It is always fun to meet folks as passionate about your favorite tools as you are. \u00a0There&#8217;s probably too much to really mention, but I definitely want to throw together a few of my thoughts and ideas. \u00a0Without futher ado &#8230; Some of the talks I went [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mrdr","category-sci-math-stat-python"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}