In almost no scientific discipline you can get around the programming language Python nowadays.
With it, powerful algorithms can be applied to large amounts of data in a performant way.
Open source libraries and frameworks enable the simple implementation of mathematical methods and data transports.

What is scikit-learn?

One of the most popular Python libraries is scikit-learn. It can be used to implement both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms. scikit-learn primarily offers ready-made solutions for data mining, preprocessing and data analysis.
The library is based on the SciPy Toolkit (SciKit) and makes extensive use of NumPy for high performance linear algebra and array operations. If you don’t know what NumPy is, check out our article on the popular Python library.
The library was first released in 2007 and since then it is constantly extended and optimized by a very active community.
The library was written primarily in Python and is based on Cython only for some high-level operations.
This makes the library easy to integrate into Python applications.

scikit-learn Features

Easily implement many machine learning algorithms with scikit-learn. Both supervised and unsupervised machine learning are supported. If you don’t know what the difference is between the two machine learning categories, check out this article from us on the topic.
The figure below lists all the algorithms provided by the library.

The figure  lists all the upervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms provided by scikit-learn..
machine learning algorithms provided by scikit-learn..

scikit-learn thus offers rich capabilities to recognize patterns and data relationships in a dataset. Thus, high dimensions can be reduced to visualize the relationships without sacrificing much information.
Features can be extracted and data clustering algorithms can be easily created.


scikit-learn is powerful and versatile. However, the library does not exist completely solitary. Besides the obvious dependency on Python, the library requires the import of other libraries for special operations.

NumPy allows easy handling of vectors, matrices or generally large multidimensional arrays. SciPy complements these functions with useful features like minimization, regression or the Fourier transform. With joblib Python functions can be built as lightweighted pipeline jobs and with threadpoolctl methods can be coordinated as threads to save resources.