Installing the necessary Python packages

The code in the book was written using Python version 3.5, and it is recommended you use the most recent version of Python 3 that is currently available, although most of the code examples may also run for older versions of Python, including Python 2.7, but code could need minor adjustments.

The recommended way to install Python and Python libraries is using Anaconda, a scientific computing distribution. You can read more about Anaconda and download it from https://www.continuum.io/downloads. Once Anaconda is in our system, we can install new Python packages with the following command:

conda install NamePackage

We will use the following Python packages:

• Ipython 5.0
• NumPy 1.11.1
• SciPy 0.18.1
• Pandas 0.18.1
• Matplotlib 1.5.3
• Seaborn 0.7.1
• PyMC3 3.0

To install the latest stable version of PyMC3, run the following command on a command-line terminal:

pip install pymc3