Chapter 3. A Tour of Machine Learning Classifiers Using scikit-learn

In this chapter, we will take a tour through a selection of popular and powerful machine learning algorithms that are commonly used in academia as well as in the industry. While learning about the differences between several supervised learning algorithms for classification, we will also develop an intuitive appreciation of their individual strengths and weaknesses. Also, we will take our first steps with the scikit-learn library, which offers a user-friendly interface for using those algorithms efficiently and productively.

The topics that we will learn about throughout this chapter are as follows:

• Introduction to the concepts of popular classification algorithms
• Using the scikit-learn machine learning library
• Questions to ask when selecting a machine learning algorithm

Choosing a classification algorithm

Choosing an appropriate classification algorithm for a particular problem task requires practice: each algorithm...