Saturday, December 15, 2018

R Vs Python: What’s the difference?

R and Python are both open-source programming languages with a large community. New libraries or tools are added continuously to their respective catalog. R is mainly used for statistical analysis while Python provides a more general approach to data science.
R and Python are state of the art in terms of programming language oriented towards data science. Learning both of them is, of course, the ideal solution. R and Python requires a time-investment, and such luxury is not available for everyone. Python is a general-purpose language with a readable syntax. R, however, is built by statisticians and encompasses their specific language.

R

Academics and statisticians have developed R over two decades. R has now one of the richest ecosystems to perform data analysis. There are around 12000 packages available in CRAN (open-source repository). It is possible to find a library for whatever the analysis you want to perform. The rich variety of library makes R the first choice for statistical analysis, especially for specialized analytical work.
The cutting-edge difference between R and the other statistical products is the output. R has fantastic tools to communicate the results. Rstudio comes with the library knitr. Xie Yihui wrote this package. He made reporting trivial and elegant. Communicating the findings with a presentation or a document is easy.

Python

Python can pretty much do the same tasks as R: data wrangling, engineering, feature selection web scrapping, app and so on. Python is a tool to deploy and implement machine learning at a large-scale. Python codes are easier to maintain and more robust than R. Years ago; Python didn't have many data analysis and machine learning libraries. Recently, Python is catching up and provides cutting-edge API for machine learning or Artificial Intelligence. Most of the data science job can be done with five Python libraries: Numpy, Pandas, Scipy, Scikit-learn and Seaborn.
Python, on the other hand, makes replicability and accessibility easier than R. In fact, if you need to use the results of your analysis in an application or website, Python is the best choice.

Difference between R and Python

ParameterRPython
ObjectiveData analysis and statisticsDeployment and production
Primary UsersScholar and R&DProgrammers and developers
FlexibilityEasy to use available libraryEasy to construct new models from scratch. I.e., matrix computation and optimization
Learning curveDifficult at the beginningLinear and smooth
Popularity of Programming Language. Percentage change4.23% in 201821.69% in 2018
Average Salary$99.000$100.000
IntegrationRun locallyWell-integrated with app
TaskEasy to get primary resultsGood to deploy algorithm
Database sizeHandle huge sizeHandle huge size
IDERstudioSpyder, Ipthon Notebook
Important Packages and librarytydiverse, ggplot2, caret, zoopandas, scipy, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, caret
DisadvantagesSlow High Learning curve Dependencies between libraryNot as many libraries as R
Advantages
  • Graphs are made to talk. R makes it beautiful
  • Large catalog for data analysis
  • GitHub interface
  • RMarkdown
  • Shiny
  • Jupyter notebook: Notebooks help to share data with colleagues
  • Mathematical computation
  • Deployment
  • Code Readability
  • Speed
  • Function in Python

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