📃 Solution for Exercise M1.01

📃 Solution for Exercise M1.01#

Imagine we are interested in predicting penguins species based on two of their body measurements: culmen length and culmen depth. First we want to do some data exploration to get a feel for the data.

What are the features? What is the target?

The features are "culmen length" and "culmen depth". The target is the penguin species.

The data is located in ../datasets/penguins_classification.csv, load it with pandas into a DataFrame.

# solution
import pandas as pd

penguins = pd.read_csv("../datasets/penguins_classification.csv")

Show a few samples of the data.

How many features are numerical? How many features are categorical?

Both features, "culmen length" and "culmen depth" are numerical. There are no categorical features in this dataset.

# solution
penguins.head()
Culmen Length (mm) Culmen Depth (mm) Species
0 39.1 18.7 Adelie
1 39.5 17.4 Adelie
2 40.3 18.0 Adelie
3 36.7 19.3 Adelie
4 39.3 20.6 Adelie

What are the different penguins species available in the dataset and how many samples of each species are there? Hint: select the right column and use the value_counts method.

# solution
penguins["Species"].value_counts()
Species
Adelie       151
Gentoo       123
Chinstrap     68
Name: count, dtype: int64

Plot histograms for the numerical features

# solution
_ = penguins.hist(figsize=(8, 4))
../_images/32eabb4a0e54e935a20fe3930eaf819b55cde1655e6701be5435ffc97821f756.png

Show features distribution for each class. Hint: use seaborn.pairplot

# solution
import seaborn

pairplot_figure = seaborn.pairplot(penguins, hue="Species")
../_images/b72c5b652777c9124fa821abea83c0f3abdad72bfc16ca54edb940bd8df005ce.png

We observe that the labels on the axis are overlapping. Even if it is not the priority of this notebook, one can tweak them by increasing the height of each subfigure.

pairplot_figure = seaborn.pairplot(penguins, hue="Species", height=4)
../_images/3471698f8e54b3520058da4bbb0925a122ea71a1d6ea3fc43cd9d16b892d3170.png

Looking at these distributions, how hard do you think it would be to classify the penguins only using "culmen depth" and "culmen length"?

Looking at the previous scatter-plot showing "culmen length" and "culmen depth", the species are reasonably well separated:

  • low culmen length -> Adelie

  • low culmen depth -> Gentoo

  • high culmen depth and high culmen length -> Chinstrap

There is some small overlap between the species, so we can expect a statistical model to perform well on this dataset but not perfectly.