Re: [Matplotlib-users] default data sets for matplotlib?

[Michael D. <md...@st...>]

On 09/26/2012 12:28 AM, jos...@gm... wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Paul Tremblay <pau...@gm...> wrote:
>> In R, there are many default data sets one can use to both illustrate code
>> and explore the scripting language. Instead of having to fake data, one can
>> pull from meaningful data sets, created in the real world. For example, this
>> one liner actually produces a plot:
>>
>> plot(mtcars$hp~mtcars$mpg)
>>
>> where mtcars refers to a built-in data set taken from Motor Trend Magazine.
>> I don't believe matplotlib has anything similar. I have started to download
>> some of the R data sets and store them as pickles for my own use. Does
>> anyone else have any interest in creating a repository for these data sets
>> or otherwise sharing them in some way?
> Vincent converted several R datasets back to csv, that can be easily
> loaded from the web with, for example, pandas.
> http://vincentarelbundock.github.com/Rdatasets/
> The collection is a bit random.
>
> statsmodels has some datasets that we use for examples and tests
> http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/devel/datasets/index.html
> We were always a bit slow with adding datasets because we were too
> cautious about licensing issues. But R seems to get away with
> considering most datasets to be public domain.
> We keep adding datasets to statsmodels as we need them for new models.
>
> The machine learning packages like sklearn have packaged the typical
> machine learning datasets.
>
> If you are interested, you could join up with statsmodels or with
> Vincent to expand on what's available.
>
It seems to me like contributing to (rather than duplicating) the work 
of one of these projects would be a great idea.  It would also be nice 
to add functionality in matplotlib to make it easier to download these 
things as a one-off -- obviously not exactly the same syntax as with R, 
but ideally with a single function call.

Mike