Introducing Scikit-Learn

Data Science, AI and ML
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Hello Everyone,

We are about to dive into one of the most interesting and favorite topic of my. Without it Machine learning would have been so difficult for me, I can’t even explain.
Let’s see what is this Scikit-Learn?
There are several Python libraries that provide solid implementations of a range of
machine learning algorithms. One of the best known is Scikit-Learn, a package that
provides efficient versions of a large number of common algorithms. Scikit-Learn is
characterized by a clean, uniform, and streamlined API, as well as by very useful and
complete online documentation. A benefit of this uniformity is that once you under‐
stand the basic use and syntax of Scikit-Learn for one type of model, switching to a
new model or algorithm is very straightforward.
This section provides an overview of the Scikit-Learn API; a solid understanding of
these API elements will form the foundation for understanding the deeper practical
discussion of machine learning algorithms and approaches in the following chapters.
We will start by covering data representation in Scikit-Learn, followed by covering the
Estimator API, and finally go through a more interesting example of using these tools
for exploring a set of images of handwritten digits.

Machine learning is about creating models from data: for that reason, we’ll start by
discussing how data can be represented in order to be understood by the computer.
The best way to think about data within Scikit-Learn is in terms of tables of data.

A basic table is a two-dimensional grid of data, in which the rows represent individual elements of the dataset, and the columns represent quantities related to each of
these elements. For example, consider the Iris dataset, famously analyzed by Ronald
Fisher in 1936. We can download this dataset in the form of a Pandas DataFrame
using the Seaborn library:

In[1]:
import seaborn as sns
iris = sns.load_dataset(‘iris’)
iris.head()

Here each row of the data refers to a single observed flower, and the number of rows
is the total number of flowers in the dataset. In general, we will refer to the rows of
the matrix as samples, and the number of rows as n_samples.
Likewise, each column of the data refers to a particular quantitative piece of informa‐
tion that describes each sample. In general, we will refer to the columns of the matrix
as features, and the number of columns as n_features.

This table layout makes clear that the information can be thought of as a two-dimensional numerical array or matrix, which we will call the features matrix. By con‐
vention, this features matrix is often stored in a variable named X. The features matrix
is assumed to be two-dimensional, with shape [n_samples, n_features], and is
most often contained in a NumPy array or a Pandas DataFrame, though some Scikit-Learn models also accept SciPy sparse matrices.
The samples (i.e., rows) always refer to the individual objects described by the dataset.
For example, the sample might be a flower, a person, a document, an image, a sound
file, a video, an astronomical object, or anything else you can describe with a set of
quantitative measurements.
The features (i.e., columns) always refer to the distinct observations that describe
each sample in a quantitative manner. Features are generally real-valued, but may be
Boolean or discrete-valued in some cases
In addition to the feature matrix X, we also generally work with a label or target array,
which by convention we will usually call y. The target array is usually one dimen‐
sional, with length n_samples, and is generally contained in a NumPy array or Pan‐
das Series. The target array may have continuous numerical values, or discrete
classes/labels. While some Scikit-Learn estimators do handle multiple target values in
the form of a two-dimensional [n_samples, n_targets] target array, we will pri‐
marily be working with the common case of a one-dimensional target array.
Often one point of confusion is how the target array differs from the other features
columns. The distinguishing feature of the target array is that it is usually the quantity
we want to predict from the data: in statistical terms, it is the dependent variable. For
example, in the preceding data we may wish to construct a model that can predict the
species of flower based on the other measurements; in this case, the species column
would be considered the feature.

Thankyou.