Installing Python scientific and statistics packages on Ubuntu

I tried to install the pandas Python library a while ago using easy_install/pip and I hit some roadblocks when it came to installing all the dependencies. So I tried it again, but this time I tried to install most of the required packages from source. Here are my notes, hopefully they'll be useful to somebody out there.

This is on an Ubuntu 12.04 machine.

Install NumPy

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/numpy/NumPy/1.6.2/numpy-1.6.2.tar.gz
# tar xvfz numpy-1.6.2.tar.gz; cd numpy-1.6.2
# cat INSTALL.txt
# apt-get install libatlas-base-dev libatlas3gf-base
# apt-get install python-dev
# python setup.py install


Install SciPy

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/scipy/scipy/0.11.0b1/scipy-0.11.0b1.tar.gz
# tar xvfz scipy-0.11.0b1.tar.gz; cd scipy-0.11.0b1/
# cat INSTALL.txt
# apt-get install gfortran g++
# python setup.py install

Install pandas

Prereq #1: NumPy 

- already installed (see above)

Prereq #2: python-dateutil

# wget http://labix.org/download/python-dateutil/python-dateutil-1.5.tar.gz
# tar xvfz python-dateutil-1.5.tar.gz; cd python-dateutil-1.5/
# python setup.py install


Prereq #3: pyTables (optional, needed for HDF5 support)

pyTables was the hardest package to install, since it has its own many dependencies:

numexpr

# wget http://numexpr.googlecode.com/files/numexpr-1.4.2.tar.gz
# tar xvfz numexpr-1.4.2.tar.gz; cd numexpr-1.4.2/
# python setup.py install

Cython

# wget http://www.cython.org/release/Cython-0.16.tar.gz
# tar xvfz Cython-0.16.tar.gz; cd Cython-0.16/
#python setup.py install

HDF5

# wget http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/current/src/hdf5-1.8.9.tar.gz
# tar xvfz hdf5-1.8.9.tar.gz; cd hdf5-1.8.9/
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
# make; make install

pyTables itself

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pytables/pytables/2.4.0b1/tables-2.4.0b1.tar.gz
# tar xvfz tables-2.4.0b1.tar.gz; cd tables-2.4.0b1/
# python setup.py install

Edit 07/10/12: statsmodels is not a prereq, see below.

Prereq #4: statsmodels

Wasn't able to install it, it said 'requires pandas' but this is what I tried:

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/statsmodels/statsmodels-0.4.3.tar.gz
# tar xvfz statsmodels-0.4.3.tar.gz; cd statsmodels-0.4.3/
# python setup.py install --> requires pandas?

Prereq #4: pytz

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pytz/pytz-2012c.tar.gz
# tar xvfz pytz-2012c.tar.gz; cd pytz-2012c/
# python setup.py install

Prereq #5: matplotlib

This was already installed on my target host during the EC2 instance bootstrap via Chef: 

# apt-get install python-matplotlib

pandas itself

# git clone git://github.com/pydata/pandas.git
# cd pandas
# python setup.py install

NOTE: Ralf Gommers added a comment that statsmodels is not a prerequisite to pandas, but instead needs to be installed once pandas is there. So I did this:

Install statsmodels

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/statsmodels/statsmodels-0.4.3.tar.gz

# tar xvfz statsmodels-0.4.3.tar.gz; cd statsmodels-0.4.3/
# python setup.py install

Finally, if you also want to dabble into machine learning algorithms:

Install scikit-learn

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/scikit-learn/scikit-learn-0.11.tar.gz
# tar xvfz scikit-learn-0.11.tar.gz; cd scikit-learn-0.11/
# python setup.py install