Scikit-learn
Definition
Scikit-learn is a free software machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms including support vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN.
Why It Matters
Scikit-learn is the go-to library for classical (non-deep learning) machine learning in Python. It provides a simple, consistent, and powerful toolkit for nearly all standard ML tasks, from data preprocessing to model evaluation.
Contextual Example
A data analyst wants to build a simple model to predict customer churn. They would use scikit-learn to load the data, split it into training and testing sets, train a logistic regression or random forest model, and evaluate its performance, all within a few lines of Python code.
Common Misunderstandings
- Scikit-learn is not designed for deep learning; for that, you would use a library like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
- It has excellent documentation and a very consistent API, which has made it extremely popular.