Setup conda environment and update readme

README.md

@@ -42,21 +42,21 @@ Motivation
 
 The motivation for this book came out of my desire for a gentle introduction to Kalman filtering. I'm a software engineer that spent almost two decades in the avionics field, and so I have always been 'bumping elbows' with the Kalman filter, but never implemented one myself. As I moved into solving tracking problems with computer vision the need became urgent. There are classic textbooks in the field, such as Grewal and Andrew's excellent *Kalman Filtering*. But sitting down and trying to read many of these books is a dismal experience if you do not have the required background. Typically the first few chapters fly through several years of undergraduate math, blithely referring you to textbooks on topics such as Itō calculus, and present an entire semester's worth of statistics in a few brief paragraphs. They are good texts for an upper undergraduate course, and an invaluable reference to researchers and professionals, but the going is truly difficult for the more casual reader. Symbology is introduced without explanation, different texts use different terms and variables for the same concept, and the books are almost devoid of examples or worked problems. I often found myself able to parse the words and comprehend the mathematics of a definition, but had no idea as to what real world phenomena they describe. "But what does that *mean?*" was my repeated thought.
 
-However, as I began to finally understand the Kalman filter I realized the underlying concepts are quite straightforward. A few simple probability rules, some intuition about how we integrate disparate knowledge to explain events in our everyday life and the core concepts of the Kalman filter are accessible. Kalman filters have a reputation for difficulty, but shorn of much of the formal terminology the beauty of the subject and of their math became clear to me, and I fell in love with the topic. 
+However, as I began to finally understand the Kalman filter I realized the underlying concepts are quite straightforward. A few simple probability rules, some intuition about how we integrate disparate knowledge to explain events in our everyday life and the core concepts of the Kalman filter are accessible. Kalman filters have a reputation for difficulty, but shorn of much of the formal terminology the beauty of the subject and of their math became clear to me, and I fell in love with the topic.
 
 As I began to understand the math and theory more difficulties present themselves. A book or paper's author makes some statement of fact and presents a graph as proof.  Unfortunately, why the statement is true is not clear to me, nor is the method for making that plot obvious. Or maybe I wonder "is this true if R=0?"  Or the author provides pseudocode at such a high level that the implementation is not obvious. Some books offer Matlab code, but I do not have a license to that expensive package. Finally, many books end each chapter with many useful exercises. Exercises which you need to understand if you want to implement Kalman filters for yourself, but exercises with no answers. If you are using the book in a classroom, perhaps this is okay, but it is terrible for the independent reader. I loathe that an author withholds information from me, presumably to avoid 'cheating' by the student in the classroom.
 
 From my point of view none of this necessary. Certainly if you are designing a Kalman filter for a aircraft or missile you must thoroughly master of all of the mathematics and topics in a typical Kalman filter textbook. I just want to track an image on a screen, or write some code for an Arduino project. I want to know how the plots in the book are made, and chose different parameters than the author chose. I want to run simulations. I want to inject more noise in the signal and see how a filter performs. There are thousands of opportunities for using Kalman filters in everyday code, and yet this fairly straightforward topic is the provenance of rocket scientists and academics.
 
-I wrote this book to address all of those needs. This is not the book for you if you program navigation computers for Boeing or design radars for Raytheon. Go get an advanced degree at Georgia Tech, UW, or the like, because you'll need it. This book is for the hobbiest, the curious, and the working engineer that needs to filter or smooth data. 
+I wrote this book to address all of those needs. This is not the book for you if you program navigation computers for Boeing or design radars for Raytheon. Go get an advanced degree at Georgia Tech, UW, or the like, because you'll need it. This book is for the hobbiest, the curious, and the working engineer that needs to filter or smooth data.
 
-This book is interactive. While you can read it online as static content, I urge you to use it as intended. It is written using Jupyter Notebook, which allows me to combine text, math, Python, and Python output in one place. Every plot, every piece of data in this book is generated from Python that is available to you right inside the notebook. Want to double the value of a parameter? Click on the Python cell, change the parameter's value, and click 'Run'. A new plot or printed output will appear in the book. 
+This book is interactive. While you can read it online as static content, I urge you to use it as intended. It is written using Jupyter Notebook, which allows me to combine text, math, Python, and Python output in one place. Every plot, every piece of data in this book is generated from Python that is available to you right inside the notebook. Want to double the value of a parameter? Click on the Python cell, change the parameter's value, and click 'Run'. A new plot or printed output will appear in the book.
 
-This book has exercises, but it also has the answers. I trust you. If you just need an answer, go ahead and read the answer. If you want to internalize this knowledge, try to implement the exercise before you read the answer. 
+This book has exercises, but it also has the answers. I trust you. If you just need an answer, go ahead and read the answer. If you want to internalize this knowledge, try to implement the exercise before you read the answer.
 
 This book has supporting libraries for computing statistics, plotting various things related to filters, and for the various filters that we cover. This does require a strong caveat; most of the code is written for didactic purposes. It is rare that I chose the most efficient solution (which often obscures the intent of the code), and in the first parts of the book I did not concern myself with numerical stability. This is important to understand - Kalman filters in aircraft are carefully designed and implemented to be numerically stable; the naive implementation is not stable in many cases. If you are serious about Kalman filters this book will not be the last book you need. My intention is to introduce you to the concepts and mathematics, and to get you to the point where the textbooks are approachable.
 
-Finally, this book is free. The cost for the books required to learn Kalman filtering is somewhat prohibitive even for a Silicon Valley engineer like myself; I cannot believe they are within the reach of someone in a depressed economy, or a financially struggling student. I have gained so much from free software like Python, and free books like those from Allen B. Downey [here](http://www.greenteapress.com/). It's time to repay that. So, the book is free, it is hosted on free servers, and it uses only free and open software such as IPython and mathjax to create the book. 
+Finally, this book is free. The cost for the books required to learn Kalman filtering is somewhat prohibitive even for a Silicon Valley engineer like myself; I cannot believe they are within the reach of someone in a depressed economy, or a financially struggling student. I have gained so much from free software like Python, and free books like those from Allen B. Downey [here](http://www.greenteapress.com/). It's time to repay that. So, the book is free, it is hosted on free servers, and it uses only free and open software such as IPython and mathjax to create the book.
 
 
 ## Reading Online
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ The book is written as a collection of Jupyter Notebooks, an interactive, browse
 
 ### binder
 
-binder serves interactive notebooks online, so you can run the code and change the code within your browser without downloading the book or installing Jupyter. 
+binder serves interactive notebooks online, so you can run the code and change the code within your browser without downloading the book or installing Jupyter.
 
 [![Binder](http://mybinder.org/badge.svg)](https://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python/master)
 
@@ -119,7 +119,21 @@ All of the filters used in this book as well as others not in this book are impl
 
 FilterPy is hosted github at (https://github.com/rlabbe/filterpy).  If you want the bleading edge release you will want to grab a copy from github, and follow your Python installation's instructions for adding it to the Python search path. This might expose you to some instability since you might not get a tested release, but as a benefit you will also get all of the test scripts used to test the library. You can examine these scripts to see many examples of writing and running filters while not in the Jupyter Notebook environment.
 
+Alternative Way of Running the Book in Conda environment
+----
+If you have conda or miniconda installed, you can create environment by
 
+    conda env update -f environment.yml
+
+and use
+
+    source activate kf_bf
+
+and
+
+    source deactivate kf_bf
+
+to activate and deactivate the environment.
 
 
 Issues or Questions
@@ -148,4 +162,3 @@ Contact
 -----
 
 rlabbejr at gmail.com
-

environment.yml

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+name: kf_bf
+dependencies:
+- python
+- ipython
+- jupyter
+- matplotlib
+- scipy
+- sympy
+- pip:
+  - filterpy