fminunc alternate in numpy

Question

Is there an alternative to the fminunc function (from octave/matlab) in python? I have a cost function for a binary classifier. Now I want to run gradient descent to get minimum value of theta. The octave/matlab implementation will look like this.

%  Set options for fminunc
options = optimset('GradObj', 'on', 'MaxIter', 400);

%  Run fminunc to obtain the optimal theta
%  This function will return theta and the cost 
[theta, cost] = ...
    fminunc(@(t)(costFunction(t, X, y)), initial_theta, options);

I have converted my costFunction in python using numpy library, and looking for the fminunc or any other gradient descent algorithm implementation in numpy.

Answer 1

There is more information about the functions of interest here: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.10.0/reference/tutorial/optimize.html

Also, it looks like you are doing the Coursera Machine Learning course, but in Python. You might check out http://aimotion.blogspot.com/2011/11/machine-learning-with-python-logistic.html; this guy's doing the same thing.