Advanced Python for scientific computing and data science

Abstract

Python is a very useful programming language for scientific computing in general and data science in particular. In this course we focus on different aspects of the Python capabilities.

Part 1: Analysing and visualising data

You will learn more about libraries that will help you to process and analyze data more efficiently and with less effort. You will learn about numpy and scipy, two libraries that implement many algorithms used in scientific computing. For visualization, you will see examples of interactive plots with Bokeh, as well as matplotlib. HDF5 is a data format that is well-suited for platform and programming language independent storage of annotated data. Since geospatial data plays a more and more important role, you will also learn about geopandas and xarray, libraries that help you reason about and query such data.

Part 2: Python dashboards

Python offers quite some options to create interactive data dashboards and light-weight web applications. In this course you will learn about panel and streamlit, two excellent options for this purpose. You will also learn how to leverage the Altair plotting library for interactive plots in dashboards.

Part 3: Python for high-performance computing

Out of the box, Python is not exactly renowned for its performance. Fortunately, there are many possibilities to improve the performance of your Python code. Besides ensuring you use an appropriate Python distribution and supporting libraries, there are also packages to help you speed up your code considerably such as numba and Cython. You will also learn how to interface with C and C++ code. Finally, you will see how to do computation in parallel using multiprocessing and dask.

With the support of the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC).

Prerequisites

Experience with the Python programming language is necessary!

Venue

UHasselt, campus Diepenbeek (Hybrid, there will be the possibility to follow online but for the optimal experience we suggest participants to follow on campus)

Sessions

Date:Start:End:10/04/202409:0013:0010/04/202414:0017:0011/04/202409:0013:0011/04/202414:0017:00

Teachers

Geert Jan Bex

Contact

flames@uhasselt.be