Recognizing hand-written digits

An example showing how the scikit-learn can be used to recognize images of hand-written digits.

This example is commented in the tutorial section of the user manual.

Script output:

Classification report for classifier SVC(C=1.0, cache_size=200, class_weight=None, coef0=0.0, degree=3,
  gamma=0.001, kernel='rbf', max_iter=-1, probability=False,
  random_state=None, shrinking=True, tol=0.001, verbose=False):
             precision    recall  f1-score   support

          0       1.00      0.99      0.99        88
          1       0.99      0.97      0.98        91
          2       0.99      0.99      0.99        86
          3       0.98      0.87      0.92        91
          4       0.99      0.96      0.97        92
          5       0.95      0.97      0.96        91
          6       0.99      0.99      0.99        91
          7       0.96      0.99      0.97        89
          8       0.94      1.00      0.97        88
          9       0.93      0.98      0.95        92

avg / total       0.97      0.97      0.97       899


Confusion matrix:
[[87  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0]
 [ 0 88  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  1]
 [ 0  0 85  1  0  0  0  0  0  0]
 [ 0  0  0 79  0  3  0  4  5  0]
 [ 0  0  0  0 88  0  0  0  0  4]
 [ 0  0  0  0  0 88  1  0  0  2]
 [ 0  1  0  0  0  0 90  0  0  0]
 [ 0  0  0  0  0  1  0 88  0  0]
 [ 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 88  0]
 [ 0  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  0 90]]

Python source code: plot_digits_classification.py

print(__doc__)

# Author: Gael Varoquaux <gael dot varoquaux at normalesup dot org>
# License: BSD 3 clause

# Standard scientific Python imports
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Import datasets, classifiers and performance metrics
from sklearn import datasets, svm, metrics

# The digits dataset
digits = datasets.load_digits()

# The data that we are interested in is made of 8x8 images of digits, let's
# have a look at the first 3 images, stored in the `images` attribute of the
# dataset.  If we were working from image files, we could load them using
# pylab.imread.  Note that each image must have the same size. For these
# images, we know which digit they represent: it is given in the 'target' of
# the dataset.
images_and_labels = list(zip(digits.images, digits.target))
for index, (image, label) in enumerate(images_and_labels[:4]):
    plt.subplot(2, 4, index + 1)
    plt.axis('off')
    plt.imshow(image, cmap=plt.cm.gray_r, interpolation='nearest')
    plt.title('Training: %i' % label)

# To apply a classifier on this data, we need to flatten the image, to
# turn the data in a (samples, feature) matrix:
n_samples = len(digits.images)
data = digits.images.reshape((n_samples, -1))

# Create a classifier: a support vector classifier
classifier = svm.SVC(gamma=0.001)

# We learn the digits on the first half of the digits
classifier.fit(data[:n_samples / 2], digits.target[:n_samples / 2])

# Now predict the value of the digit on the second half:
expected = digits.target[n_samples / 2:]
predicted = classifier.predict(data[n_samples / 2:])

print("Classification report for classifier %s:\n%s\n"
      % (classifier, metrics.classification_report(expected, predicted)))
print("Confusion matrix:\n%s" % metrics.confusion_matrix(expected, predicted))

images_and_predictions = list(zip(digits.images[n_samples / 2:], predicted))
for index, (image, prediction) in enumerate(images_and_predictions[:4]):
    plt.subplot(2, 4, index + 5)
    plt.axis('off')
    plt.imshow(image, cmap=plt.cm.gray_r, interpolation='nearest')
    plt.title('Prediction: %i' % prediction)

plt.show()

Total running time of the example: 0.57 seconds ( 0 minutes 0.57 seconds)