Exploring Line Lengths in Python Packages

This week, Twitter upped their single-tweet character limit from 140 to 280, purportedly based on this interesting analysis of tweet lengths published on Twitter's engineering blog. The gist of the analysis is this: English language tweets display a roughly log-normal distribution of character counts, except near the 140-character limit, at which the distribution spikes:

The analysis takes this as evidence that twitter users often "cram" their longer thoughts into the 140 character limit, and suggest that a 280-character limit would more naturally accommodate the distribution of people's desired tweet lengths.

This immediately brought to mind another character limit that many Python programmers face in their day-to-day lives: the 79-character line limit suggested by Python's PEP8 style guide:

Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters.

I began to wonder whether popular Python packages (e.g. NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, Matplotlib, AstroPy) display anything similar to what is seen in the distribution of tweet lengths.

Spoiler alert: they do! And the details of the distribution reveal some insights into the programming habits and stylistic conventions of the communities who write them.

Exposing Python 3.6's Private Dict Version

I just got home from my sixth PyCon, and it was wonderful as usual. If you weren't able to attend—or even if you were—you'll find a wealth of entertaining and informative talks on the PyCon 2017 YouTube channel.

Two of my favorites this year were a complementary pair of talks on Python dictionaries by two PyCon regulars: Raymond Hettinger's Modern Python Dictionaries A confluence of a dozen great ideas and Brandon Rhodes' The Dictionary Even Mightier (a followup of his PyCon 2010 talk, The Mighty Dictionary)

Raymond's is a fascinating dive into the guts of the CPython dict implementation, while Brandon's focuses more on recent improvements in the dict's user-facing API. One piece both mention is the addition in Python 3.6 of a private dictionary version to aid CPython optimization efforts. In Brandon's words:

"PEP509 added a private version number... every dictionary has a version number, and elsewhere in memory a master version counter. And when you go and change a dictionary the master counter is incremented from a million to a million and one, and that value a million and one is written into the version number of that dictionary. So what this means is that you can come back later and know if it's been modified, without reading maybe its hundreds of keys and values: you just look and see if the version has increased since the last time you were there."

He later went on to say,

"[The version number] is internal; I haven't seen an interface for users to get to it..."

which, of course, I saw as an implicit challenge. So let's expose it!

A Practical Guide to the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram

This week I published the preprint of a manuscript that started as a blog post, but quickly out-grew this medium: Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram.

Over the last couple years I've written a number of Python implementations of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram (I'd recommend AstroPy's LombScargle in most cases today), and also wrote a marginally popular blog post and somewhat pedagogical paper on the subject. This all has led to a steady trickle of emails from students and researchers asking for advice on applying and interpreting the Lomb-Scargle algorithm, particularly for astronomical data. I noticed that these queries tended to repeat many of the same questions and express some similar misconceptions, and this paper is my attempt to address those once and for all — in a "mere" 55 pages (which includes 26 figures and 4 full pages of references, so it's not all that bad).

Group-by From Scratch

I've found one of the best ways to grow in my scientific coding is to spend time comparing the efficiency of various approaches to implementing particular algorithms that I find useful, in order to build an intuition of the performance of the building blocks of the scientific Python ecosystem.

In this vein, today I want to take a look at an operation that is in many ways fundamental to data-driven exploration: the group-by, otherwise known as the split-apply-combine pattern. An architypical example of a summation group-by is shown in this figure, borrowed from the Aggregation and Grouping section of the Python Data Science Handbook:

The basic idea is to split the data into groups based on some value, apply a particular operation to the subset of data within each group (often an aggregation), and then combine the results into an output dataframe. Python users generally turn to the Pandas library for this type of operation, where it is is implemented effiently via a concise object-oriented API:

Triple Pendulum CHAOS!

Earlier this week a tweet made the rounds which features a video that nicely demonstrates chaotic dynamical systems in action:

Edit: a reader pointed out that the original creator of this animation posted it on reddit in 2016.

Naturally, I immediately wondered whether I could reproduce this simlulation in Python. This post is the result.

Reproducible Data Analysis in Jupyter

Jupyter notebooks provide a useful environment for interactive exploration of data. A common question I get, though, is how you can progress from this nonlinear, interactive, trial-and-error style of exploration to a more linear and reproducible analysis based on organized, packaged, and tested code. This series of videos presents a case study in how I personally approach reproducible data analysis within the Jupyter notebook.

Each video is approximately 5-8 minutes; the videos are available in a YouTube Playlist. Alternatively, below you can find the videos with some description and links to relevant resources

Conda: Myths and Misconceptions

I've spent much of the last decade using Python for my research, teaching Python tools to other scientists and developers, and developing Python tools for efficient data manipulation, scientific and statistical computation, and visualization. The Python-for-data landscape has changed immensely since I first installed NumPy and SciPy from via a flickering CRT display. Among the new developments since those early days, the one with perhaps the broadest impact on my daily work has been the introduction of conda, the open-source cross-platform package manager first released in 2012.

In the four years since its initial release, many words have been spilt introducing conda and espousing its merits, but one thing I have consistently noticed is the number of misconceptions that seem to remain in the (often fervent) discussions surrounding this tool. I hope in this post to do a small part in putting these myths and misconceptions to rest.

Analyzing Pronto CycleShare Data with Python and Pandas

This week Pronto CycleShare, Seattle's Bicycle Share system, turned one year old. To celebrate this, Pronto made available a large cache of data from the first year of operation and announced the Pronto Cycle Share's Data Challenge, which offers prizes for different categories of analysis.

There are a lot of tools out there that you could use to analyze data like this, but my tool of choice is (obviously) Python. In this post, I want to show how you can get started analyzing this data and joining it with other available data sources using the PyData stack, namely NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn. Here I'll take a look at some of the basic questions you can answer with this data. Later I hope to find the time to dig deeper and ask some more interesting and creative questions – stay tuned!

Out-of-Core Dataframes in Python: Dask and OpenStreetMap

In recent months, a host of new tools and packages have been announced for working with data at scale in Python. For an excellent and entertaining summary of these, I'd suggest watching Rob Story's Python Data Bikeshed talk from the 2015 PyData Seattle conference. Many of these new scalable data tools are relatively heavy-weight, involving brand new data structures or interfaces to other computing environments, but Dask stands out for its simplicity. Dask is a light-weight framework for working with chunked arrays or dataframes across a variety of computational backends. Under the hood, Dask simply uses standard Python, NumPy, and Pandas commands on each chunk, and transparently executes operations and aggregates results so that you can work with datasets that are larger than your machine's memory.

In this post, I'll take a look at how dask can be useful when looking at a large dataset: the full extracted points of interest from OpenStreetMap. We will use Dask to manipulate and explore the data, and also see the use of matplotlib's Basemap toolkit to visualize the results on a map.

Frequentism and Bayesianism V: Model Selection

Last year I wrote a series of posts comparing frequentist and Bayesian approaches to various problems:

Here I am going to dive into an important topic that I've not yet covered: model selection. We will take a look at this from both a frequentist and Bayesian standpoint, and along the way gain some more insight into the fundamental philosophical divide between frequentist and Bayesian methods, and the practical consequences of this divide.

My quick, TL;DR summary is this: for model selection, frequentist methods tend to be conceptually difficult but computationally straightforward, while Bayesian methods tend to be conceptually straightforward but computationally difficult.