How do you make this code more pythonic?

Question

Could you guys please tell me how I can make the following code more pythonic?

The code is correct. Full disclosure - it's problem 1b in Handout #4 of this machine learning course. I'm supposed to use newton's algorithm on the two data sets for fitting a logistic hypothesis. But they use matlab & I'm using scipy

Eg one question i have is the matrixes kept rounding to integers until I initialized one value to 0.0. Is there a better way?

Thanks

import os.path
import math
from numpy import matrix
from scipy.linalg import inv #, det, eig

x = matrix( '0.0;0;1'  )
y = 11
grad = matrix( '0.0;0;0'  )
hess = matrix('0.0,0,0;0,0,0;0,0,0')
theta = matrix( '0.0;0;0'  ) 


# run until convergence=6or7
for i in range(1, 6):
  #reset
  grad = matrix( '0.0;0;0'  )
  hess = matrix('0.0,0,0;0,0,0;0,0,0')

  xfile = open("q1x.dat", "r")
  yfile = open("q1y.dat", "r")


  #over whole set=99 items  
  for i in range(1, 100):    
    xline = xfile.readline()
    s= xline.split("  ")
    x[0] = float(s[1])
    x[1] = float(s[2])
    y = float(yfile.readline())

    hypoth = 1/ (1+ math.exp(-(theta.transpose() * x)))

    for j in range(0,3):
      grad[j] = grad[j] + (y-hypoth)* x[j]      
      for k in range(0,3):
        hess[j,k] = hess[j,k] - (hypoth *(1-hypoth)*x[j]*x[k])


  theta = theta - inv(hess)*grad #update theta after construction

  xfile.close()
  yfile.close()

print "done"
print theta

Answer 1

x = matrix([[0.],[0],[1]])
theta = matrix(zeros([3,1]))
for i in range(5):
  grad = matrix(zeros([3,1]))
  hess = matrix(zeros([3,3]))
  [xfile, yfile] = [open('q1'+a+'.dat', 'r') for a in 'xy']
  for xline, yline in zip(xfile, yfile):
    x.transpose()[0,:2] = [map(float, xline.split("  ")[1:3])]
    y = float(yline)
    hypoth = 1 / (1 + math.exp(theta.transpose() * x))
    grad += (y - hypoth) * x
    hess -= hypoth * (1 - hypoth) * x * x.transpose()
  theta += inv(hess) * grad
print "done"
print theta

Answer 2

One obvious change is to get rid of the "for i in range(1, 100):" and just iterate over the file lines. To iterate over both files (xfile and yfile), zip them. ie replace that block with something like:

 import itertools

 for xline, yline in itertools.izip(xfile, yfile):
    s= xline.split("  ")
    x[0] = float(s[1])
    x[1] = float(s[2])
    y = float(yline)
    ...

(This is assuming the file is 100 lines, (ie. you want the whole file). If you're deliberately restricting to the first 100 lines, you could use something like:

 for i, xline, yline in itertools.izip(range(100), xfile, yfile):

However, its also inefficient to iterate over the same file 6 times - better to load it into memory in advance, and loop over it there, ie. outside your loop, have:

xfile = open("q1x.dat", "r")
yfile = open("q1y.dat", "r")
data = zip([line.split("  ")[1:3] for line in xfile], map(float, yfile))

And inside just:

for (x1,x2), y in data:
    x[0] = x1
    x[1] = x2
     ...

Answer 3

the matrixes kept rounding to integers until I initialized one value to 0.0. Is there a better way?

At the top of your code:

from __future__ import division

In Python 2.6 and earlier, integer division always returns an integer unless there is at least one floating point number within. In Python 3.0 (and in future division in 2.6), division works more how we humans might expect it to.

If you want integer division to return an integer, and you've imported from future, use a double //. That is

from __future__ import division
print 1//2 # prints 0
print 5//2 # prints 2
print 1/2  # prints 0.5
print 5/2  # prints 2.5

Answer 4

You could make use of the with statement.

Answer 5

the code that reads the files into lists could be drastically simpler

for line in open("q1x.dat", "r"):
    x = map(float,line.split("  ")[1:])
y = map(float, open("q1y.dat", "r").readlines())