Scikit-Learn(or why I joined an open source software project)

Gilles Louppe

Dept. of EE & CS, & GIGA-RUniversite de Liege, Belgium

October 30, 2013

Publishing scientific software matters 1

I Software is a central part of modern scientific discovery.

I Software developed in one field can often be applied toadvance a different field if the underlying mathematics iscommon.

I The public availability of code is a corner stone of thescientific method.

1. Pradal C. et al, Publishing scientific software matters, 2013.

if it’s not open and verifiable by others, it’s not science, orengineering, or whatever it is you call what we do 2

2. V. Stodden, The scientific method in practice.

As a young PhD student full of illusions...

I wanted to write useful scientific software, for me and others

Leverage existing software

... but I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel !

... and then I joined an OSS project

I An open source Machine Learning library in PythonI Classical and well-established algorithms

- Supervised and unsupervised algorithms- Model evaluation and selection- Data processing and feature engineering

Collaborative development

Software quality matters

Peer-reviewed and well-tested code

Simple and consistent API

from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier

clf = RandomForestClassifier()

clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

y_pred = clf.predict(X_test)

Simple and consistent API

from sklearn.svm import SVC

clf = SVC()

clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

y_pred = clf.predict(X_test)

Simple and consistent API

from sklearn.linear_model import LassoCV

clf = LassoCV()

clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

y_pred = clf.predict(X_test)

Side effect 1 : Learn and improve your skills

I Strict programming practices

I Software management (release cycle, git, etc)

I Team work

Side effect 2 : People might start using your software

In research

In industry

Side effect 3 : You get to meet interesting people

(and eat pizzas !)

Start with small contributions...

Publish and share your research code

Join an open source software project

Questions ?