Installing scikit-learn

Note

If you wish to contribute to the project, it’s recommended you install the latest development version.

Installing the latest release

Scikit-learn requires:

  • Python (>= 2.6 or >= 3.3),
  • NumPy (>= 1.6.1),
  • SciPy (>= 0.9).

If you already have a working installation of numpy and scipy, the easiest way to install scikit-learn is using pip

pip install -U scikit-learn

or conda:

conda install scikit-learn

We don’t recommend installing scipy or numpy using pip on linux, as this will involve a lengthy build-process with many dependencies. Without careful configuration, building numpy yourself can lead to an installation that is much slower than it should be. If you are using Linux, consider using your package manager to install scikit-learn. It is usually the easiest way, but might not provide the newest version. If you haven’t already installed numpy and scipy and can’t install them via your operation system, it is recommended to use a third party distribution.

Third-party Distributions

If you don’t already have a python installation with numpy and scipy, we recommend to install either via your package manager or via a python bundle. These come with numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, matplotlib and many other helpful scientific and data processing libraries.

Available options are:

Canopy and Anaconda for all supported platforms

Canopy and Anaconda both ship a recent version of scikit-learn, in addition to a large set of scientific python library for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

Anaconda offers scikit-learn as part of its free distribution.

Warning

To upgrade or uninstall scikit-learn installed with Anaconda or conda you should not use the pip command. Instead:

To upgrade scikit-learn:

conda update scikit-learn

To uninstall scikit-learn:

conda remove scikit-learn

Upgrading with pip install -U scikit-learn or uninstalling pip uninstall scikit-learn is likely fail to properly remove files installed by the conda command.

pip upgrade and uninstall operations only work on packages installed via pip install.

Python(x,y) for Windows

The Python(x,y) project distributes scikit-learn as an additional plugin, which can be found in the Additional plugins page.

For installation instructions for particular operating systems or for compiling the bleeding edge version, see the Advanced installation instructions.