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by purplecpa 3598 days ago
I'm interested but thought scikit-learn was the go to for Python machine learning. Is there a reason there is no mention of it?
2 comments

scikit-learn doesn't have a strong neural network codebase -- for anything not NN based they've largely got you covered (along with good infrastructure tooling for pipelines, cross validation, hyper-parameter searching etc.). Contrary to the impression you may get if you only follow the current buzzwords there is a great deal of value in machine learning right now beyond NNs and deep learning. On the other hand if deep learning is what you want to do, scikit-learn is not currently the best library for that.
scikit-learn would likely fall into the category of "black box" frameworks the author mentions. If I understand correctly, this book will let the reader gain an understanding of the underlying algorithms from an intuitive standrpoint.
It is worth noting that scikit-learn does value clear understandable implementations, so you can actually pop open the source code and expect to find something other than a black box. Now, in many cases you'll have optimization work that means a slightly less obvious approach is taken, but the scikit-learn maintainers do work hard to try and ensure that, if you want to learn, you should be able to open up the code and do so.
couldn't have said it better myself :)