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Python-Pandas is an open source, BSD-licensed library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language. While it is not quite as a rich as R in terms of statistics, it's really getting there. One major benefit is that its data structures are python-native. This means that if you exploit a lot of the python specific functionality to clean up your data, you will not have to transform it for use in R. In some cases, this ca be a substantial bottleneck. There's a pretty decent tutorial video (~30 minutes) (sound cuts out 20-23mins), a class video (~3 hours), and a "tour" video (~10 minutes), among many others.
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In addition to a truly dizzying number of individual add-on libraries for Python, there are a few distributions of sets of python libraries that try to eliminate the hassle of pulling together lots of libraries. We should investigate these!
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