1）Powerful interactive shells (terminal and Qt-based).
2）A browser-based notebook with support for code, text, mathematical expressions, inline plots and other rich media.
3）Support for interactive data visualization and use of GUI toolkits.
4）Flexible, embeddable interpreters to load into your own projects.
5）Easy to use, high performance tools for parallel computing.

“iPython 是一个Python 的交互式Shell，比默认的Python Shell 好用得多，功能也更强大。 她支持语法高亮、自动完成、代码调试、对象自省，支持 Bash Shell 命令，内置了许多很有用的功能和函式等，非常容易使用。 ” 启动iPython的时候用这个命令“ipython –pylab”，默认开启了matploblib的绘图交互，用起来很方便。

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四、Python 机器学习 & 数据挖掘 工具包

机器学习和数据挖掘这两个概念不太好区分，这里就放到一起了。这方面的开源Python工具包有很多，这里先从熟悉的讲起，再补充其他来源的资料，也欢迎大家补充。

1. scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python

scikit-learn (formerly scikits.learn) is an open source machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms including support vector machines, logistic regression, naive Bayes, random forests, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN, and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy.

首先推荐大名鼎鼎的scikit-learn，scikit-learn是一个基于NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib的开源机器学习工具包，主要涵盖分类，回归和聚类算法，例如SVM， 逻辑回归，朴素贝叶斯，随机森林，k-means等算法，代码和文档都非常不错，在许多Python项目中都有应用。例如在我们熟悉的NLTK中，分类器方面就有专门针对scikit-learn的接口，可以调用scikit-learn的分类算法以及训练数据来训练分类器模型。这里推荐一个视频，也是我早期遇到scikit-learn的时候推荐过的：推荐一个Python机器学习工具包Scikit-learn以及相关视频–Tutorial: scikit-learn – Machine Learning in Python

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2. Pandas: Python Data Analysis Library

Pandas is a software library written for the Python programming language for data manipulation and analysis. In particular, it offers data structures and operations for manipulating numerical tables and time series.

第一次接触Pandas是由于Udacity上的一门数据分析课程“Introduction to Data Science” 的Project需要用Pandas库，所以学习了一下Pandas。Pandas也是基于NumPy和Matplotlib开发的，主要用于数据分析和数据可视化，它的数据结构DataFrame和R语言里的data.frame很像，特别是对于时间序列数据有自己的一套分析机制，非常不错。这里推荐一本书《Python for Data Analysis》，作者是Pandas的主力开发，依次介绍了iPython, NumPy, Pandas里的相关功能，数据可视化，数据清洗和加工，时间数据处理等，案例包括金融股票数据挖掘等，相当不错。

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分割线，以上工具包基本上都是自己用过的，以下来源于其他同学的线索，特别是《Python机器学习库》，《23个python的机器学习包》，做了一点增删修改，欢迎大家补充
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3. mlpy – Machine Learning Python

mlpy is a Python module for Machine Learning built on top of NumPy/SciPy and the GNU Scientific Libraries.

mlpy provides a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning methods for supervised and unsupervised problems and it is aimed at finding a reasonable compromise among modularity, maintainability, reproducibility, usability and efficiency. mlpy is multiplatform, it works with Python 2 and 3 and it is Open Source, distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

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4. MDP：The Modular toolkit for Data Processing

Modular toolkit for Data Processing (MDP) is a Python data processing framework.
From the user’s perspective, MDP is a collection of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms and other data processing units that can be combined into data processing sequences and more complex feed-forward network architectures.
From the scientific developer’s perspective, MDP is a modular framework, which can easily be expanded. The implementation of new algorithms is easy and intuitive. The new implemented units are then automatically integrated with the rest of the library.
The base of available algorithms is steadily increasing and includes signal processing methods (Principal Component Analysis, Independent Component Analysis, Slow Feature Analysis), manifold learning methods ([Hessian] Locally Linear Embedding), several classifiers, probabilistic methods (Factor Analysis, RBM), data pre-processing methods, and many others.

“MDP用于数据处理的模块化工具包，一个Python数据处理框架。 从用户的观点，MDP是能够被整合到数据处理序列和更复杂的前馈网络结构的一批监督学习和非监督学习算法和其他数据处理单元。计算依照速度和内存需求而高效的执行。从科学开发者的观点，MDP是一个模块框架，它能够被容易地扩展。新算法的实现是容易且直观的。新实现的单元然后被自动地与程序库的其余部件进行整合。MDP在神经科学的理论研究背景下被编写，但是它已经被设计为在使用可训练数据处理算法的任何情况中都是有用的。其站在用户一边的简单性，各种不同的随时可用的算法，及应用单元的可重用性，使得它也是一个有用的教学工具。”

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5. PyBrain