This documentation is for scikit-learn version 0.16.1Other versions

If you use the software, please consider citing scikit-learn.

Plotting Learning Curves¶

On the left side the learning curve of a naive Bayes classifier is shown for the digits dataset. Note that the training score and the cross-validation score are both not very good at the end. However, the shape of the curve can be found in more complex datasets very often: the training score is very high at the beginning and decreases and the cross-validation score is very low at the beginning and increases. On the right side we see the learning curve of an SVM with RBF kernel. We can see clearly that the training score is still around the maximum and the validation score could be increased with more training samples.

Python source code: plot_learning_curve.py

print(__doc__)

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn import cross_validation
from sklearn.naive_bayes import GaussianNB
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.learning_curve import learning_curve

def plot_learning_curve(estimator, title, X, y, ylim=None, cv=None,
n_jobs=1, train_sizes=np.linspace(.1, 1.0, 5)):
"""
Generate a simple plot of the test and traning learning curve.

Parameters
----------
estimator : object type that implements the "fit" and "predict" methods
An object of that type which is cloned for each validation.

title : string
Title for the chart.

X : array-like, shape (n_samples, n_features)
Training vector, where n_samples is the number of samples and
n_features is the number of features.

y : array-like, shape (n_samples) or (n_samples, n_features), optional
Target relative to X for classification or regression;
None for unsupervised learning.

ylim : tuple, shape (ymin, ymax), optional
Defines minimum and maximum yvalues plotted.

cv : integer, cross-validation generator, optional
If an integer is passed, it is the number of folds (defaults to 3).
Specific cross-validation objects can be passed, see
sklearn.cross_validation module for the list of possible objects

n_jobs : integer, optional
Number of jobs to run in parallel (default 1).
"""
plt.figure()
plt.title(title)
if ylim is not None:
plt.ylim(*ylim)
plt.xlabel("Training examples")
plt.ylabel("Score")
train_sizes, train_scores, test_scores = learning_curve(
estimator, X, y, cv=cv, n_jobs=n_jobs, train_sizes=train_sizes)
train_scores_mean = np.mean(train_scores, axis=1)
train_scores_std = np.std(train_scores, axis=1)
test_scores_mean = np.mean(test_scores, axis=1)
test_scores_std = np.std(test_scores, axis=1)
plt.grid()

plt.fill_between(train_sizes, train_scores_mean - train_scores_std,
train_scores_mean + train_scores_std, alpha=0.1,
color="r")
plt.fill_between(train_sizes, test_scores_mean - test_scores_std,
test_scores_mean + test_scores_std, alpha=0.1, color="g")
plt.plot(train_sizes, train_scores_mean, 'o-', color="r",
label="Training score")
plt.plot(train_sizes, test_scores_mean, 'o-', color="g",
label="Cross-validation score")

plt.legend(loc="best")
return plt

X, y = digits.data, digits.target

title = "Learning Curves (Naive Bayes)"
# Cross validation with 100 iterations to get smoother mean test and train
# score curves, each time with 20% data randomly selected as a validation set.
cv = cross_validation.ShuffleSplit(digits.data.shape[0], n_iter=100,
test_size=0.2, random_state=0)

estimator = GaussianNB()
plot_learning_curve(estimator, title, X, y, ylim=(0.7, 1.01), cv=cv, n_jobs=4)

title = "Learning Curves (SVM, RBF kernel, $\gamma=0.001$)"
# SVC is more expensive so we do a lower number of CV iterations:
cv = cross_validation.ShuffleSplit(digits.data.shape[0], n_iter=10,
test_size=0.2, random_state=0)
estimator = SVC(gamma=0.001)
plot_learning_curve(estimator, title, X, y, (0.7, 1.01), cv=cv, n_jobs=4)

plt.show()


Total running time of the example: 7.59 seconds ( 0 minutes 7.59 seconds)