Description
Machine Learning has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and many software libraries have been created which implement these routines. scikit-learn is a python package built on numpy and scipy which implements a wide variety of machine learning algorithms, useful for everything from facial recognition to optical character recognition to automated classification of astronomical images. This tutorial will begin with a crash course in machine learning and introduce participants to several of the most common learning techniques for classification, regression, and visualization. Building on this background, we will explore several applications of these techniques to scientific data -- in particular, galaxy, star, and quasar data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey -- and learn some basic astrophysics along the way. From these examples, tutorial participants will gain knowledge and experience needed to successfully solve a variety of machine learning and statistical data mining problems with python.