shogunmike

You're correct - it doesn't get into the deep learning aspect yet.

This article is in fact the second part of a larger planned series. The idea is to present more depth than a "quick refresher" that seems to be common to a lot of blog posts, but far less material than would be found in a 10-week (or single semester) undergraduate course.

Thanks for the Stanford link. I'll check it out.

Indeed - I recommended Strang's book in this article and the previous one.

Disclaimer: I run a site discussing Python/ML topics as applied to quant finance.

Python is primarily used because the machine learning libraries within it are very mature and play nicely with each other.

It is easy to get started in Python (and most of its libraries) by downloading the freely-available Anaconda distribution. This usually "just works", cross-platform. The language itself is extremely straightforward to pick up.

Within the Python ecosystem there are many mature libraries. In particular NumPy was written for carrying out vectorised computation. This enabled more libraries, such as pandas (for dataframe manipulation), SciPy (for general scientific computation) and scikit-learn (for ML) to be developed. Each of these libraries also possess clean and consistent APIs for carrying out their specialty tasks.

Thus it becomes straightforward in Python to import data from many sources, "wrangle" it into the correct format (even with real-world, messy data), put it into an ML data pipeline and then visualise it easily (via Matplotlib or Seaborn). In addition there is Jupyter for straightforward "notebook" style research.

Finally, Theano and TensorFlow are two great deep learning libraries. There are a few hiccups on installation sometimes, but for the most part they "just work".

There are still some "missing pieces" however. The statsmodels library does a good job of time series analysis, but it doesn't yet compete fully with R in this respect.

Julia is also likely to make serious inroads into Python's usage in the near future. I'm excited about where the project is heading.

Thankyou for the necessary feedback!

I'm actually in the process of overhauling the design of the site, particularly with regards to mobile, as the current Bootstrap-derived design pushes all sidebar content to the top on mobile/table.