Scientific figures are at their most informative when they include the individual data used to calculate summary statistics such as means and standard deviations. Why is showing data important? As previously pointed out here and here, figures with means, standard deviations, standard errors, etc. can be misleading and conceal the nature of the underlying data. As highlighted in our previous
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Jupyter notebooks are a scientific computing development platform that can run many different programming languages, including Python via the interactive Python interpreter IPython. The key advantage in a notebook environment is that code can be sectioned into cells for testing while retaining all the interactive features of IPython, including magic commands. IPython magics are a specialised set of commands hosted
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In a previous post we learned how to perform an independent t-test in R to determine whether a difference between two groups is important or significant. In this post we will learn how to perform the same test using the Python programming language. Along the way we will learn a few things about t distributions and calculating confidence intervals. dataset.In
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Comma separated values (CSV) files are a type of text file commonly used to store data. In a CSV file, each line of text contains values separated with commas. CSV files can be imported into Python in different ways (eg. csv.reader, numpy.loadtxt, etc). One useful method is to import CSV files into Pandas dataframes. Pandas package. Pandas is a Python
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You can detect errors in your code using if statements, as we did in the first post, or you can detect them using the try-except structure, as we did in the second and third posts. With both of these approaches, we used the print command to provide the user with some information about the error and the sys.exit() command to
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Thinking of where our program might go wrong is never ending. However, there are situations where you can predict the most common types of errors and plan for their occurrence. In this post we will learn how to test for specific error exceptions in Python. Different types of errors As part of this series of tutorials (1, 2), we have
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