What are the differences between Pandas and NumPy+SciPy in Python?
pandas provides high level data manipulation tools built on top of NumPy. NumPy by itself is a fairly low-level tool, similar to MATLAB. pandas on the other hand provides rich time series functionality, data alignment, NA-friendly statistics, groupby, merge and join methods, and lots of other conveniences. It has become very popular in recent years in financial applications. I will have a chapter dedicated to financial data analysis using pandas in my upcoming book.
They both seem exceedingly similar and I'm curious as to which package would be more beneficial for financial data analysis.