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
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import numpy as np
import matplotlib as plt
from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
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We have imported all the libraries. Next, we read the dataset:
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dataset = datasets.load_iris()
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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
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model.fit(dataset.data, dataset.target)
expected = dataset.target
predicted = model.predict(dataset.data)
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Step 4: Print confusion matrix
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print(metrics.classification_report(expected, predicted))
print(metrics.confusion_matrix(expected, predicted))
