sklearn.externals模块说明

Question

I could not find any description about the sklearn.externals module in scikit-learn. Does anybody knows what is this module for?

And what is sklearn.externals.six.moves doing exactly?

Answer 1

You can see a readme on that module's Github page . It says:

This directory contains bundled external dependencies that are updated every once in a while.

In other words, the code in there is not really part of scikit, it's just other libraries that scikit uses, but it stores its own copies of them inside itself to avoid dependency problems if the user has different versions installed.

Answer 2

And what is sklearn.externals.six.moves doing exactly?

Nothing . It is created in six.py and populated via the add_move() method, which is never called . To check via command-line:

>>> from sklearn import externals
>>> externals.six.moves
<module 'sklearn.externals.six.moves' (built-in)>
>>> help(externals.six.moves)
# gives nothing, let's see its attributes and methods
>>> externals.six.moves.__dict__
{'__name__': 'sklearn.externals.six.moves', '__doc__': None}