After building a model in Python, how do I save the model so I could shut down my computer and work on it the next day?

Question

Say, I have finished building a regression model in Python, as below:

from sklearn import linear_model

model = linear_model.LogisticRegression().fit(X_train, Y_train)

How do I save the "model" that I have built so I could shut down my computer and work on it the next day without having to rerun the code to get the "model" again?

The reason why I am asking this is because my dataset is quite huge and it will take really long having to rerun to get the model again.

Answer 1

This is a problem of serialisation and a very simple way would be to use the pickle module. The following snippets show how you can save and load a Python object.

To save:

import pickle

with open("YOUR_FILE_NAME_HERE.pkl", 'wb') as file:
    pickle.dump(model, file)

To load:

# Import all your relevant libraries first
from sklearn import linear_model
...


import pickle

with open("YOUR_FILE_NAME_HERE.pkl", 'rb') as file:
    model = pickle.load(file)

The idea is to essentially create a file representation of your object ( model ) and save it to file in a way that can be interpreted and loaded on demand. This can be achieved in many different ways, but the simplest method with Python is to use pickle which creates a binary representation of your object and all the associated objects and modules.

For further reading, consult the pickle documentation here and for a better understanding of serialisation, refer to here .