From a quick look, I would guess NumPy and Pandas are fine, since they seem to be focused on more basic things. Particularly I would expect a matrix math library to be used, because think it's kind of a waste of time to have to explain "this is how matrix multiplication works, okay, now we're going to use this library because the important parts are written in C and it uses a non-naive algorithm so it's 10x+ faster than what you would casually write" It may be that parts of Pandas or NumPy do "too much", but you could just avoid using those parts.