Introduction to Scikit-Learn

While pandas will save you a lot of time in loading, examining, and cleaning data, the machine learning algorithms that will enable you to do predictive modeling are located in other packages. We consider scikit-learn to be the premier machine learning package for Python, outside of deep learning. While it's impossible for any one package to offer "everything," scikit-learn comes pretty close in terms of accommodating a wide range of approaches for classification and regression, and unsupervised learning. That being said, a few other packages you should also be aware of are as follows:

SciPy:

• Most of the packages we've used so far are actually part of the SciPy ecosystem.

• SciPy itself offers lightweight functions for classical approaches such as linear regression and linear programming.

StatsModels:

• More oriented toward statistics and more comfortable for users familiar with R

• Can get p-values and confidence intervals on regression coefficients

• Capability for time series...