NumPy visualization and

data representantion
NumPy package is the workhorse of data analysis, machine learning, and scienti c
computing in the python ecosystem. It is so due to the fact that it vastly simpli es
manipulating and crunching vectors and matrices. Some of python’s leading package rely
on NumPy as a fundamental piece of their infrastructure
Examples:

Scikit-learn
Scipy
Pandas
TensorFlow
Beyond the ability to slice and dice numeric data, mastering numpy will give you an edge
when dealing and debugging with advanced usecases in these libraries.
Here we are going to look at some of the main ways to use NumPy and how it can
represent different types of data (tables, images, text…etc) before we use it to more
complex things such as machine learning models.

import numpy as np
Creating Arrays
We can create a NumPy array by passing a python list to it and using np.array() . In this
case, python creates the array we can see on the right here:
There are often cases when we want NumPy to initialize the values of the array for us.
NumPy provides methods like ones() , zeros() , and random.random() for these
cases. We just pass them the number of elements we want it to generate:
Once we’ve created our arrays, we can start to manipulate them in interesting ways.

Array Arithmetic
Let’s create two NumPy arrays to showcase their usefulness. We’ll call them data and
ones :
Adding them up position-wise (i.e. adding the values of each row) is as simple as typing
data + ones :

Personal note: When i started learning such tools, i found it kinda refreshing that an
abstraction like this makes me not have to program such a calculation in loops. It’s a
wonderful abstraction that allows you to think about problems at a higher level, but at the
same time i thought if there's such of abstractions there shuolb be something weird behind
it.
It’s not only addition that we can do this way (We can do almost everything like this):
There are often cases when we want carry out an operation between an array and a single
number (we can also call this an operation between a vector and a scalar). Say, for example,
our array represents distance in miles and we want to convert it to kilometers. We simply
say data *1.6:

As we can see, NumPy understood that operation to mean that the multiplication should
happen with each cell? That concept is called broadcasting, and it’s very useful.
Indexing
We can index and slice NumPy arrays in all the ways we can slice python lists:
Aggregation
Additional bene ts Numpy has are aggregation functions:

In addition to min , max , and sum , you get all the greats like mean to get the average,
prod to get the result of multiplying all the elements together, std to get standard
deviation, and plenty of others.
In more dimensions
All the examples we’ve looked at deal with vectors in one dimension. A key part of the
beauty of NumPy is its ability to apply everything we’ve looked at so far to any number of
dimensions!!!
Creating Matrices
We can pass python lists of lists in the following shape to have NumPy create a matrix to
represent them:

np.array([1,2],[3,4]])
We can also use the same methods we mentioned above ( ones() , zeros() , and
random.random() ) as long as we give them a tuple describing the dimensions of the
matrix we are creating:
Matrix Arithmetic
We can add and multiply matrices using arithmetic operators (+-*/) if the two matrices
are the same size!!!!. NumPy handles those as position-wise operations:
We can get away with doing these arithmetic operations on matrices of different size only
if the different dimension is one (e.g. the matrix has only one column or one row), in which
case NumPy uses its broadcast rules for that operation
Dot Product
A key distinction to make with arithmetic is the case of matrix multiplication using the dot
product. NumPy gives every matrix a dot() method we can use to carry-out dot product
operations with other matrices:
We've added matrix dimensions at the bottom of this gure to stress that the two matrices
have to have the same dimension on the side they face each other with. You can visualize
this operation as looking like this:
Matrix Indexing
Indexing and slicing operations become even more useful when we’re manipulating
matrices:
Matrix Aggregation
We can aggregate matrices the same way we aggregated vectors:
Not only can we aggregate all the values in a matrix, but we can also aggregate across the
rows or columns by using the axis parameter:
Transposing and Reshaping
A common need when dealing with matrices is the need to rotate them. This is often the
case when we need to take the dot product of two matrices and need to align the
dimension they share. NumPy arrays have a convenient property called T to get the
transpose of a matrix:
In more advanced use case, you may nd yourself needing to switch the dimensions of a
certain matrix. This is often the case in machine learning applications where a certain
model expects a certain shape for the inputs that is different from your dataset. NumPy’s
reshape() method is useful in these cases. You just pass it the new dimensions you want for
the matrix. You can pass -1 for a dimension and NumPy can infer the correct dimension
based on your matrix:
Yet More Dimensions
NumPy can do everything we’ve mentioned in any number of dimensions. Its central data
structure is called ndarray (N-Dimensional Array) for a reason.
In a lot of ways, dealing with a new dimension is just adding a comma to the parameters of
a NumPy function:
Practical Usage
And now for the payoff. Here are some examples of the useful things NumPy will help you
through.
Formulas
Implementing mathematical formulas that work on matrices and vectors is a key use case
to consider NumPy for. This is the main reason why NumPy is the darling of the scienti c
python community. For example, consider the mean square error formula that is central to
supervised machine learning models tackling regression problems:
Implementing this is quite simple in NumPy:
The beauty of this is that numpy does not care if predictions and labels contain one
or a thousand values (as long as they’re both the same size). We can walk through an
example stepping sequentially through the four operations in that line of code:
Both the predictions and labels vectors contain three values. Which means n has a value of
three. After we carry out the subtraction, we end up with the values looking like this:
Then we can square the values in the vector:
Now we sum these values:

Which results in the error value for that prediction and a score for the quality of the model.
Data Representation
Think of all the data types you’ll need to crunch and build models around (spreadsheets,
images, audio…etc). So many of them are perfectly suited for representation in an n-
dimensional array:
Tables and Spreadsheets

A spreadsheet or a table of values is a two dimensional matrix. Each sheet in a

spreadsheet can be its own variable. The most popular abstraction in python for
those is the pandas dataframe, which actually uses NumPy and builds on top of it.
Audio and Timeseries

An audio le is a one-dimensional array of samples. Each sample is a number

representing a tiny chunk of the audio signal. CD-quality audio may have 44,100
samples per second and each sample is an integer between -65535 and 65536.
Meaning if you have a ten-seconds WAVE le of CD-quality, you can load it in a
NumPy array with length 10 * 44,100 = 441,000 samples. Want to extract the rst
second of audio? simply load the le into a NumPy array that we’ll call audio, and get
audio[:44100].

Here’s a look at a slice of an audio le:

The same goes for time-series data (for example, the price of a stock over time).
Images

An image is a matrix of pixels of size (height x width).

If the image is black and white (a.k.a. grayscale), each pixel can be
represented by a single number (commonly between 0 (black) and 255
(white)). Want to crop the top left 10 x 10 pixel part of the image? Just tell
NumPy to get you image[:10,:10].

Here’s a look at a slice of an image le:

If the image is colored, then each pixel is represented by three numbers - a value for
each of red, green, and blue. In that case we need a 3rd dimension (because each
cell can only contain one number). So a colored image is represented by an ndarray
of dimensions: (height x width x 3).
Language
If we’re dealing with text, the story is a little different. The numeric representation of text
requires a step of building a vocabulary (an inventory of all the unique words the model
knows) and an embedding step. Let us see the steps of numerically representing this
(translated) quote by an ancient spirit:

“Have the bards who preceded me left any theme unsung?”

A model needs to look at a large amount of text before it can numerically represent the
anxious words of this warrior poet. We can proceed to have it process a small dataset and
use it to build a vocabulary (of 71,290 words):
The sentence can then be broken into an array of tokens (words or parts of words based on
common rules):

We then replace each word by its id in the vocabulary table:

These ids still don’t provide much information value to a model. So before feeding a
sequence of words to a model, the tokens/words need to be replaced with their
embeddings (50 dimension word2vec embedding in this case):
You can see that this NumPy array has the dimensions [embedding_dimension x
sequence_length]. In practice these would be the other way around, but I’m presenting it
this way for visual consistency. For performance reasons, deep learning models tend to
preserve the rst dimension for batch size (because the model can be trained faster if
multiple examples are trained in parallel). This is a clear case where reshape() becomes
super useful. A model like BERT (http://ruder.io/nlp-imagenet/), for example, would expect
its inputs in the shape: [batch_size, sequence_length, embedding_size].