Python is one of the best programming languages out there, with an extensive coverage in scientific computing: computer vision, artificial intelligence, mathematics, astronomy to name a few. Unsurprisingly, this holds true for machine learning as well.
Of course, it has some disadvantages too; one of which is that the tools and libraries for Python are scattered. If you are a unix-minded person, this works quite conveniently as every tool does one thing and does it well. However, this also requires you to know different libraries and tools, including their advantages and disadvantages, to be able to make a sound decision for the systems that you are building. Tools by themselves do not make a system or product better, but with the right tools we can work much more efficiently and be more productive. Therefore, knowing the right tools for your work domain is crucially important.
This post aims to list and describe the most useful machine learning tools and libraries that are available for Python. To make this list, we did not require the library to be written in Python; it was sufficient for it to have a Python interface. We also have a small section on Deep Learning at the end as it has received a fair amount of attention recently.
We do not aim to list all the machine learning libraries available in Python (the Python package index returns 139 results for “machine learning”) but rather the ones that we found useful and well-maintained to the best of our knowledge. Moreover, although some of modules could be used for various machine learning tasks, we included libraries whose main focus is machine learning. For example, although Scipy has some clustering algorithms, the main focus of this module is not machine learning but rather in being a comprehensive set of tools for scientific computing. Therefore, we excluded libraries like Scipy from our list (though we use it too!).
Another thing worth mentioning is that we also evaluated the library based on how it integrates with other scientific computing libraries because machine learning (either supervised or unsupervised) is part of a data processing system. If the library that you are using does not fit with your rest of data processing system, then you may find yourself spending a tremendous amount of time to creating intermediate layers between different libraries. It is important to have a great library in your toolset but it is also important for that library to integrate well with other libraries.
