Best Python Libraries for Machine Learning

Machine learning is the most algorithm-intense field in computer science. Gone are those days when people had to code all algorithms for machine learning. Thanks to Python and it’s libraries, modules, and frameworks.

Python machine learning libraries have grown to become the most preferred language for machine learning algorithm implementations. Learning Python is essential to master data science and machine learning. Let’s have a look at the main Python libraries used for machine learning.

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1) NumPy

NumPy is a well known general-purpose array-processing package. An extensive collection of high complexity mathematical functions make NumPy powerful to process large multi-dimensional arrays and matrices. NumPy is very useful for handling linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and random numbers. Other libraries like TensorFlow uses NumPy at the backend for manipulating tensors.

With NumPy, you can define arbitrary data types and easily integrate with most databases. NumPy can also serve as an efficient multi-dimensional container for any generic data that is in any datatype. The key features of NumPy include powerful N-dimensional array object, broadcasting functions, and out-of-box tools to integrate C/C++ and Fortran code.

Its key features are as below:

• Supports n-dimensional arrays to enable vectorization, indexing, and broadcasting operations.
• Supports Fourier transforms mathematical functions, linear algebra methods, and random number generators.
• Implementable on different computing platforms, including distributed and GPU computing.
• Easy-to-use high-level syntax with the optimized Python code to provide high speed and flexibility.
• In addition to that, NumPy enables the numerical operations of plenty of libraries associated with data science, data visualization, image processing, quantum computing, signal processing, geographic processing, bioinformatics, etc. So, it is one of the versatile machine learning libraries.

2) SciPy

With machine learning growing at supersonic speed, many Python developers were creating python libraries for machine learning, especially for scientific and analytical computing. Travis Oliphant, Eric Jones, and Pearu Peterson in 2001 decided to merge most of these bits and pieces codes and standardize it. The resulting library was then named as SciPy library.

The current development of the SciPy library is supported and sponsored by an open community of developers and distributed under the free BSD license.

The SciPy library offers modules for linear algebra, image optimization, integration interpolation, special functions, Fast Fourier transform, signal and image processing, Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving, and other computational tasks in science and analytics.

The underlying data structure used by SciPy is a multi-dimensional array provided by the NumPy module. SciPy depends on NumPy for the array manipulation subroutines. The SciPy library was built to work with NumPy arrays along with providing user-friendly and efficient numerical functions.

One of the unique features of SciPy is that its functions are useful in maths and other sciences. Some of its extensively used functions are optimization functions, statistical functions, and signal processing. It supports functions for finding the numerical solute to integrals. So you can solve differential equations and optimization.

The following areas of SciPy’s applications make it one of the popular machine learning libraries.

• Multidimensional image processing
• Solves Fourier transforms, and differential equations
• Its optimized algorithms help you to efficiently and reliably perform linear algebra calculations

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3) Scikit-learn

In 2007, David Cournapeau developed the Scikit-learn library as part of the Google Summer of Code project. In 2010 INRIA involved and did the public release in January 2010. Skikit-learn was built on top of two Python libraries – NumPy and SciPy and has become the most popular Python machine learning library for developing machine learning algorithms.

Scikit-learn has a wide range of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms that works on a consistent interface in Python. The library can also be used for data-mining and data analysis. The main machine learning functions that the Scikit-learn library can handle are classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, model selection, and preprocessing.

Many ML enthusiasts and data scientists use scikit-learn in their AI journey. Essentially, it is an all-inclusive machine learning framework. Occasionally, many people overlook it because of the prevalence of more cutting-edge Python libraries and frameworks. However, it is still a powerful library and efficiently solves complex Machine Learning tasks.

The following features of scikit-learn make it one of the best machine learning libraries in Python:

• Easy to use for precise predictive data analysis
• Simplifies solving complex ML problems like classification, preprocessing, clustering, regression, model selection, and dimensionality reduction
• Plenty of inbuilt machine learning algorithms
• Helps build a fundamental to advanced level ML model
• Developed on top of prevalent libraries like SciPy, NumPy, and Matplotlib

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4) Theano

Theano is a python machine learning library that can act as an optimizing compiler for evaluating and manipulating mathematical expressions and matrix calculations. Built on NumPy, Theano exhibits a tight integration with NumPy and has a very similar interface. Theano can work on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and CPU.

Working on GPU architecture yields faster results. Theano can perform data-intensive computations up to 140x faster on GPU than on a CPU. Theano can automatically avoid errors and bugs when dealing with logarithmic and exponential functions. Theano has built-in tools for unit-testing and validation, thereby avoiding bugs and problems.

Theano’s fast speeds give a competitive edge to C projects for problem-solving tasks that involve huge amounts of data. It makes most GPUs perform better than C language on a CPU.

It efficiently accepts structures and transforms them into extremely efficient code which uses NumPy and a few native libraries. Primarily, it is designed to deal with various computations demanded by huge neural network algorithms utilized in Deep Learning. Therefore, it is one of the popular machine learning libraries in Python, as well as deep learning.

Here are some prominent benefits of using Theano:

1. Stability Optimization:

It can determine some unsteady expressions and can use steadier expressions to solve them

2. Execution Speed Optimization:

It uses the latest GPUs and implements parts of expressions in your GPU or CPU. So, it is faster than Python.

3. Symbolic Differentiation:

It automatically creates symbolic graphs for computing gradients.

5) TensorFlow

TensorFlow was developed for Google’s internal use by the Google Brain team. Its first release came in November 2015 under Apache License 2.0. TensorFlow is a popular computational framework for creating machine learning models. TensorFlow supports a variety of different toolkits for constructing models at varying levels of abstraction.

TensorFlow exposes a very stable Python and C++ APIs. It can expose, backward compatible APIs for other languages too, but they might be unstable. TensorFlow has a flexible architecture with which it can run on a variety of computational platforms CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs. TPU stands for Tensor processing unit, a hardware chip built around TensorFlow for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

TensorFlow empowers some of the largest contemporary AI models globally. Alternatively, it is recognized as an end-to-end Deep Learning and Machine Learning library to solve practical challenges.

The following key features of TensorFlow make it one of the best machine learning libraries Python:

• Comprehensive control on developing a machine learning model and robust neural network
• Deploy models on cloud, web, mobile, or edge devices through TFX, TensorFlow.js, and TensorFlow Lite
• Supports abundant extensions and libraries for solving complex problems
• Supports different tools for integration of Responsible AI and ML solutions

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6) Keras

Keras has over 200,000 users as of November 2017. Keras is an open-source library used for neural networks and machine learning. Keras can run on top of TensorFlow, Theano, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, R, or PlaidML. Keras also can run efficiently on CPU and GPU.

Keras works with neural-network building blocks like layers, objectives, activation functions, and optimizers. Keras also have a bunch of features to work on images and text images that comes handy when writing Deep Neural Network code.

It also supports convolutional and recurrent neural networks.

It was released in 2015 and by now, it is a cutting-edge open-source Python deep learning framework and API. It is identical to Tensorflow in several aspects.

You can conclude that Keras is one of the versatile machine learning libraries Python because it includes:

• Everything that TensorFlow provides but presents in easy to understand format.
• Quickly runs various DL iterations with full deployment proficiencies.
• Support large TPUs and GPU clusters which facilitate commercial Python machine learning.
• It is used in various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and generative deep learning. So, it is useful for graph, structured, audio, and time series data.

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7) PyTorch

PyTorch has a range of tools and libraries that support computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing. The PyTorch library is open-source and is based on the Torch library. The most significant advantage of PyTorch library is it’s ease of learning and using.

PyTorch can smoothly integrate with the python data science stack, including NumPy. You will hardly make out a difference between NumPy and PyTorch. PyTorch also allows developers to perform computations on Tensors. PyTorch has a robust framework to build computational graphs on the go and even change them in runtime. Other advantages of PyTorch include multi GPU support, simplified preprocessors, and custom data loaders.

Facebook released PyTorch as a powerful competitor of TensorFlow in 2016. It has now attained huge popularity among deep learning and machine learning researchers. Various aspects of PyTorch suggest that it is one of the outstanding Python libraries for machine learning. Here are some of its key capabilities.

• Fully support the development of customized deep neural network
• Supports various extensions and tools to solve complex problems

8) Pandas

Pandas are turning up to be the most popular Python library that is used for data analysis with support for fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to work on both “relational” or “labeled” data. Pandas today is an inevitable library for solving practical, real-world data analysis in Python. Pandas is highly stable, providing highly optimized performance. The backend code is purely written in C or Python.

The two main types of data structures used by pandas are :

• Series (1-dimensional)
• DataFrame (2-dimensional)

These two put together can handle a vast majority of data requirements and use cases from most sectors like science, statistics, social, finance, and of course, analytics and other areas of engineering.

It was launched as an open-source Python library in 2009. Currently, it has become one of the favourite Python libraries for machine learning among many ML enthusiasts. The reason is it offers some robust techniques for data analysis and data manipulation. This library is extensively used in academia. Moreover, it supports different commercial domains like business and web analytics, economics, statistics, neuroscience, finance, advertising, etc. It also works as a foundational library for many advanced Python libraries.

Here are some of its key features:

• Handles time series data and missing data
• Supports indexing, slicing, reshaping, subsetting, joining, and merging of large datasets
• Offers optimized code for Python using C and Cython

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9) Matplotlib

Matplotlib is a data visualization library that is used for 2D plotting to produce publication-quality image plots and figures in a variety of formats. The library helps to generate histograms, plots, error charts, scatter plots, bar charts with just a few lines of code.

It provides a MATLAB-like interface and is exceptionally user-friendly. It works by using standard GUI toolkits like GTK+, wxPython, Tkinter, or Qt to provide an object-oriented API that helps programmers to embed graphs and plots into their applications.

It is the oldest Python machine learning library. However, it is still not obsolete. It is one of the most innovative data visualization libraries for Python. So, the ML community admires it.

The following features of the Matplotlib library make it a famous Python machine learning among the ML community:

• Its interactive charts and plots allow fascinating data storytelling
• Offers an extensive list of plots appropriate for a particular use case
• Charts and plots are customizable and exportable to various file formats
• Offers embeddable visualizations with different GUI applications
• Various Python frameworks and libraries extend Matplotlib

Conclusion

Python is the go-to language when it comes to data science and machine learning and there are multiple reasons to choose python for data science.

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