0% found this document useful (0 votes)
1 views5 pages

Scikit-learn(Sklearn) in Python

Scikit-learn (sklearn) is a prominent Python library for machine learning that provides tools for classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. It includes a wide range of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms, cross-validation methods, and various datasets for practice. While it is excellent for building machine learning models, it is not designed for data manipulation, which is better suited for libraries like NumPy and Pandas.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
1 views5 pages

Scikit-learn(Sklearn) in Python

Scikit-learn (sklearn) is a prominent Python library for machine learning that provides tools for classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. It includes a wide range of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms, cross-validation methods, and various datasets for practice. While it is excellent for building machine learning models, it is not designed for data manipulation, which is better suited for libraries like NumPy and Pandas.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 5

Scikit-learn(sklearn) in Python

What is scikit-learn or sklearn?

Scikit-learn is probably the most useful library for machine learning in Python.

The sklearn library contains a lot of efficient tools for machine learning and

statistical modeling including classification, regression, clustering and

dimensionality reduction.

Please note that sklearn is used to build machine learning models. It should not

be used for reading the data, manipulating and summarizing it. There are better

libraries for that (e.g. NumPy, Pandas etc.)

Components of scikit-learn:

Scikit-learn comes loaded with a lot of features. Here are a few of them to help

you understand the spread:

 Supervised learning algorithms: Think of any supervised machine learning

algorithm you might have heard about and there is a very high chance that it is

part of scikit-learn. Starting from Generalized linear models (e.g Linear

Regression), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees to Bayesian

methods – all of them are part of scikit-learn toolbox. The spread of machine
learning algorithms is one of the big reasons for the high usage of scikit -learn. I

started using scikit to solve supervised learning problems and would recommend

that to people new to scikit / machine learning as well.

 Cross-validation: There are various methods to check the accuracy of

supervised models on unseen data using sklearn.

 Unsupervised learning algorithms: Again there is a large spread of machine

learning algorithms in the offering – starting from clustering, factor analysis,

principal component analysis to unsupervised neural networks.

 Various toy datasets: This came in handy while learning scikit-learn. I had

learned SAS using various academic datasets (e.g. IRIS dataset, Boston House

prices dataset). Having them handy while learning a new library helped a lot.

 Feature extraction: Scikit-learn for extracting features from images and text

(e.g. Bag of words)


Community / Organizations using scikit-learn:

One of the main reasons behind using open source tools is the huge community

it has. Same is true for sklearn as well. There are about 35 contributors to scikit -

learn till date, the most notable being Andreas Mueller (P.S. Andy’s machine

learning cheat sheet is one of the best visualizations to understand the

spectrum of machine learning algorithms).

There are various Organizations of the likes of Evernote, Inria and AWeber which

are being displayed on scikit learn home page as users. But I truly believe that

the actual usage is far more.


In addition to these communities, there are various meetups across the globe.

There was also a Kaggle knowledge contest, which finished recently but might

still be one of the best places to start playing around with the library.

Machine Learning cheat sheet – see Original image for better resolution

Quick Example:

Now that you understand the ecosystem at a high level, let me illustrate the use

of sklearn with an example. The idea is to just illustrate the simplicity of usage of

sklearn. We will have a look at various algorithms and best ways to use them in

one of the articles which follow.

We will build a logistic regression on IRIS dataset:

Step 1: Import the relevant libraries and read the dataset

[stextbox id = “grey”]

import numpy as np
import matplotlib as plt

from sklearn import datasets

from sklearn import metrics

from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression

[/stextbox]

We have imported all the libraries. Next, we read the dataset:

[stextbox id = “grey”]

dataset = datasets.load_iris()

[/stextbox]

Step 2: Understand the dataset by looking at distributions and plots

I am skipping these steps for now. You can read this article, if you want to learn

exploratory analysis.

Step 3: Build a logistic regression model on the dataset and making

predictions

[stextbox id = “grey”]

model.fit(dataset.data, dataset.target)

expected = dataset.target

predicted = model.predict(dataset.data)

[/stextbox]
Step 4: Print confusion matrix

[stextbox id = “grey”]

print(metrics.classification_report(expected, predicted))

print(metrics.confusion_matrix(expected, predicted))

You might also like