that questionwhat is the best way to phrase my question(sas machine learning problemhave collected enough data to represent the problem want to solvewhat features of the data did extractand will these enable the right predictionshow will measure success in my applicationhow will the machine learning solution interact with other parts of my research or business productin larger contextthe algorithms and methods in machine learning are only one part of greater process to solve particular problemand it is good to keep the big picture in mind at all times many people spend lot of time building complex machine learning solutionsonly to find out they don' solve the right problem when going deep into the technical aspects of machine learning (as we will in this book)it is easy to lose sight of the ultimate goals while we will not discuss the questions listed here in detailwe still encourage you to keep in mind all the assumptions that you might be makingexplicitly or implicitlywhen you start building machine learning models why pythonpython has become the lingua franca for many data science applications it combines the power of general-purpose programming languages with the ease of use of domain-specific scripting languages like matlab or python has libraries for data loadingvisualizationstatisticsnatural language processingimage processingand more this vast toolbox provides data scientists with large array of generaland special-purpose functionality one of the main advantages of using python is the ability to interact directly with the codeusing terminal or other tools like the jupyter notebookwhich we'll look at shortly machine learning and data analysis are fundamentally iterative processesin which the data drives the analysis it is essential for these processes to have tools that allow quick iteration and easy interaction as general-purpose programming languagepython also allows for the creation of complex graphical user interfaces (guisand web servicesand for integration into existing systems scikit-learn scikit-learn is an open source projectmeaning that it is free to use and distributeand anyone can easily obtain the source code to see what is going on behind the why python