Scientific Computing in Python: Introduction to NumPy and Matplotlib

Since many students in my Stat 451: Introduction to Machine Learning and Statistical Pattern Classification class are relatively new to Python and NumPy, I was recently devoting a lecture to the latter. Since the course notes are based on an interactive Jupyter notebook file, which I used as a basis for the lecture videos, I thought it would be worthwhile to reformat it as a blog article with the embedded "narrated content" – the video recordings. This section offers a quick tour of the NumPy library for working with multi-dimensional arrays in Python. NumPy (short for Numerical Python) was created in 2005 by merging Numarray into Numeric. Since then, the open source NumPy library has evolved into an essential library for scientific computing in Python.