How to Install Scikit-Learn on PyCharm?

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Scikit-Learn, often abbreviated as sklearn, is a popular machine learning library for Python.

Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the Scikit-Learn library in your project within a virtual environment or globally?

Here’s a solution that always works:

  • Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
  • Select your current project.
  • Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
  • Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
  • Now type in the library to be installed, in your example "sklearn" without quotes, and click Install Package.
  • Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s the installation process as a short animated video—it works analogously for Scikit-Learn, just type in “sklearn” or “scikit-learn” in the search field instead:

Make sure to select only “scikit-learn” or “sklearn” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the same terms (false positives):

scikit-learn install pycharm

Alternatively, you can run the pip install sklearn or pip install scikit-learn command in your PyCharm “Terminal” view:

$ pip install sklearn       # Alternative 1
$ pip install scikit-learn  # Alternative 2

Both alternatives accomplish the same thing because sklearn is a dummy package pointing to scikit-learn (alias). The following figure shows how to use pip to install the sklearn package:

"pip install sklearn" in PyCharm

You can check your installation using the following two lines of Python code that print out the version of the package:

import sklearn
print(sklearn.__version__)

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