As part of my goal to become proficient with Python in addition to R I recently discovered the awesomeness that is Pycaret.
Setting it up was a bit of a hassle as it involved a bit more than just “pip install pycaret”, which is what I am used to from R and which is also what I have so far seen with Python.
But it turns out, that there are some dependencies to older versions of Python/packages, which means these need to be installed explicitely.
So in the end I ended up learning quite a lot of new things about requirements.txt and virtual environments in Python.
And in case someone else is in the same situation I briefly wanted to write what worked for me.
As of Sep 2024 the most recent version of pycaret is 3.1.0, which only works with Python 3.10 and some older versions of packages, e.g. numpy<1.24, pandas<2.0.0.
So for me it was worth it setting it up in a virtual environment dedicated to pycaret and containing
A working code example based on this setup can be found here
I first wanted to install pycaret using RStudio and the reticulate package as for me this is what I am most used to.
But it turns out that the integration with reticulate seems to be a bit wonky - or at least I wasn’t able to get it up and running.
So I took this as an opportunity to explore Visual Studio Code a bit more and lo and behold, setting up pycaret was incredibly smooth using VSC.
And on top of that, working with VSC was also quite fun, so now I definitely want to get to know it better :)