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A comment on How Python became the language of choice for data science. Parent comment

Re:How Python became the language of choice for data science by drunkpotato on Friday November 22, 2013 @07:28AM (#6780389)
I just wanted to interject here that this limitation is no longer true in Matlab. Take a look at dataset[1] and grpstats[2] in the Statistics Toolbox. They make data frame-style computations much nicer. I was banging my head against Matlab control structures until I found those.

  means_by_zip = grpstats(ds, {'zipcode'})
[1] http://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/dataset.html [2] http://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/grpstats.html
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Re:How Python became the language of choice for data science by sveme on Friday November 22, 2013 @10:10AM (#6781104)
FYI, they finally included a dataframe like data type in base MATLAB as well and called it `table`:

http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2013/09/10/introduction-to-...

So you don't need a stats license for that anymore. The question is how many functions will accept this datatype, which is one of the key problems with some of the more advanced datatypes (timeseries has similar issues).

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Re:How Python became the language of choice for data science by drunkpotato on Friday November 22, 2013 @11:57AM (#6781959)
Oh, very nice! It's been about a year since I've worked in Matlab on a daily basis, so it's good to see they brought that into base.

I didn't have much trouble with datasets because it's fairly painless to convert to a matrix with double(ds) if you setup your text columns as ordinals and nominals rather than cell arrays.

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