Non-Integer Class Labels Scikit-Learn

Question

Quick SVM question for scikit-learn. When you train an SVM, it\'s something like

from sklearn import svm
s = svm.SVC()
s.fit(training_data, labels)


        

Answer 1

The recent version of sklearn is able to use string as the labels. For example:

from sklearn.svm import SVC
clf = SVC()
x = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6]]
y = ['dog', 'cat']
clf.fit(x,y)

yhat = clf.predict([[1,2,5]])
print yhat[0]

Answer 2

Passing strings as classes directly is on my todo, but it is not supported in the SVMs yet. For the moment, we have the LabelEncoder that can do the book keeping for you.

[edit]This should work now out of the box[/edit]