Machine learning in Python with scikit-learn

Online

January 30 - February 02, 2023

9:00 - 13:00 CET

Instructors: Sven van der Burg, Cunliang Geng

Helpers: Barbara Vreede, Olga Lyashevska, Dani Bodor

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General Information

The eScience Center offers a range of free workshops and training courses, open to all researchers affiliated with Dutch research organizations. We organize workshops covering digital skills needed to put reproducible research into practice. These include online collaboration, reproducible code and good programming practices. We also offer more advanced workshops such as GPU Programming, Parallel Programming and Deep Learning.

This hands-on workshop will provide you with the basics of machine learning using Python.

Machine learning is the field devoted to methods and algorithms that ‘learn’ from data. It can be applied to a vast range of different domains, from linguistics to physics and from medical imaging to history.

This workshop aims to cover the basics of machine learning in a practical and hands-on manner, so that upon completion, you will be able to train your first machine learning models and understand what next steps to take to improve them.

We start with processing the data so that it is suitable for machine learning. Then we learn how to fit a model to the data using scikit-learn. We learn how to select the best model, learn about different machine learning models, and discuss some of the best practices when starting your own machine learning project.

Who: 

The course aims to be accessible without a strong technical background. The requirements for this course are:

  • basic knowledge of Python programming : defining variables, writing functions, importing modules
  • some prior experience with the NumPy, pandas and Matplotlib libraries is recommended but not required.

Where: This training will take place online. The instructors will provide you with the information you will need to connect to this meeting.

When: January 30 - February 02, 2023, 9:00 - 13:00 CET.

Requirements: Participants must have access to a computer with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).

Accessibility: We are dedicated to providing a positive and accessible learning environment for all. Please notify the instructors in advance of the workshop if you require any accommodations or if there is anything we can do to make this workshop more accessible to you.

Contact: Please email s.vanderburg@esciencecenter.nl or c.geng@esciencecenter.nl for technical questions (for example about setup issues or prerequisites). Or email training@esciencecenter.nl for other questions or more information.


Code of Conduct

Participants are expected to follow these guidelines:

Syllabus

Machine learning concepts

The predictive modeling pipeline

Selecting the best model

Intuition on various models

Machine learning best practices

Schedule

Day 1

09:00 Welcome and icebreaker
09:15 Machine learning concepts
10:15 Coffee break
10:30 Tabular data exploration
11:30 Coffee break
11:45 Fitting a scikit-learn model on numerical data
12:45 Wrap-up
13:00 END

Day 2

09:00 Welcome and icebreaker
09:15 Fitting a scikit-learn model on numerical data
10:15 Coffee break
10:30 Handling categorical data
11:30 Coffee break
11:45 Handling categorical data
12:45 Wrap-up
13:00 END

Day 3

09:00 Welcome and icebreaker
09:15 Overfitting and underfitting
10:15 Coffee break
10:30 Validation and learning curves
11:30 Coffee break
11:45 Bias versus variance trade-off
12:45 Wrap-up
13:00 END

Day 4

09:00 Welcome and icebreaker
09:15 Intuition on various models
10:15 Coffee break
10:30 Your own machine learning project: penguins dataset
11:30 Coffee break
11:45 Machine learning best practices
12:45 Wrap-up
13:00 END

All times in the schedule are in the CET timezone.


Setup

To participate in this workshop, you will need access to software as described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.

Software setup

Please follow these setup instructions

Install the videoconferencing client

If you haven't used Zoom before, go to the official website to download and install the Zoom client for your computer.

Set up your workspace

Like other Carpentries workshops, you will be learning by "coding along" with the Instructors. To do this, you will need to have both the window for the tool you will be learning about (a terminal, RStudio, your web browser, etc..) and the window for the Zoom video conference client open. In order to see both at once, we recommend using one of the following set up options:

This blog post includes detailed information on how to set up your screen to follow along during the workshop.