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By Adhinga Fredrick Following Unfollow Follow   1,149 March 28, 2023 Following Unfollow Follow

Category:

Django

Programming

Python

Building Machine Learning-Enabled Web Applications with Django and Scikit-Learn Introduction

Machine learning is the art of training a machine to think for itself. It is slowly becoming a must have in today’s software applications. Nearly all applications that provide users with improved and user-specific information are applying Machine learning. Popular websites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest all apply machine learning to improve their user experiences.
Django is a Python web development framework that uses Model – View – Controller architecture to make web development easy and concise.
Scikit-Learn is an open-source machine learning library used for data analysis, data mining and data science.

Prerequisites for this tutorial:

• You have Python installed on your local machine
• Basic knowledge of Python
• Basic knowledge of Django
• Basic knowledge of Machine learning

This will make the learning process a lot more easier and seamless. Once the above prerequisites for this tutorial are met, we now proceed. In this article, we will be building a simple NLP project for spam detection using Django and Scikit-Learn libraries to learn how to build machine learning enabled web applications.

Creating a Python environment for our project

Creating a virtual environment is a recommended practice when developing Python projects, especially when working with different libraries and dependencies. A virtual environment is an isolated workspace where you can install and manage specific versions of packages required for a project without affecting the global Python installation or other projects.

To create a virtual environment, first create a new folder for the project. Say Django-ml as follows:

Next, we will use Python’s default virtual environment manage “Venv” to create a virtual environment to manage your project’s dependencies separately from our system’s global Python environment using the following command:

Activate the virtual environment using the appropriate command for your operating system:

–   For Windows:

–   For macOS and Linux:

Installing Django and Scikit-Learn

With the virtual environment activated, install Django and Scikit-Learn using pip:

We are using pip, the Python package installer, to install the necessary libraries for our project. django is the web framework we will use, scikit-learn is the machine learning library, and pandas and numpy are libraries for data manipulation and analysis.

Creating a new Django project

After installing the Django and Scikit-Learn, proceed to create a new django project using the following command:

Navigate to the project directory:

Configuring the settings file

Open the settings.py file located in the core directory and configure the necessary settings, such as the database, timezone, and static files.

Add the following lines of code to handle static files:

Creating a new Django app

It is a good practice to always create all your django apps into one folder named apps. To do this, in your project directory, create a new folder called apps. Navigate into the apps directory and create a new folder called classifier.

In you project directory, now create a new Django app within your project that will be used to handle the classification functionality using the command below:

Your directory structure should look like this:

Register the new app, classifier in the settings.py file by adding it to the INSTALLED_APPS list as follows:

On your apps.py file, make the following changes:

Next, we migrate our database by running the migration command below:

Run the server to see if our application was set up correctly:

Expected output:

Front page of the web application

Creating the Model

We will use Scikit-Learn to build a spam detection model, which will be trained on a dataset containing spam and non-spam messages.

Download the SMS Spam Collection dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/SMS+Spam+Collection

Create a new file called train_model.py in the ‘detector’ app folder and add the following blocks of code:

In this script, we first load the spam messages dataset using Pandas’ read_csv function. Then, we use the CountVectorizer from Scikit-Learn to convert the text messages into numerical features. This process is called feature extraction and is essential for training machine learning models with text data. Next, we split the dataset into training and testing sets using the train_test_split function. We then created a MultinomialNB classifier, which is a Naive Bayes classifier suitable for text classification tasks. We train the classifier using the training data and evaluate its performance on the test data.

Finally, we save the trained classifier and the count vectorizer to files using the pickle module. These files will be used later in our web application to make predictions. Run the ‘train_model.py’ script to train the spam detection model as follows:

Expected output:

Output of the “python train_model.py” command

From the classification report, you can see the accuracy and classification report. The command will generate two files: spam_detector_model.pkl and count_vectorizer.pkl. These files contain the trained model and the count vectorizer, respectively.

Integrating the Model into Django

Once done with building and saving the model and vectorizer, we will now integrate the trained model into our Django application using the steps below. First, move the spam_detector_model.pkl and count_vectorizer.pkl files to the detector app folder.

Creating the View

Now that we have our model and vectorizer, we can create the views for our web application. In views.py of the detector app, create a new view called predict as follows:

In this file, we define two views: index and predict. The index view renders the main HTML template for our application, while the predict view handles POST requests containing a message to be classified as spam or not spam. In the predict view, we first load the saved model and vectorizer from the files generated in from training our model, then, we use the vectorizer to transform the input message into a numerical feature vector, which is then passed to the classifier to make a prediction. The prediction is returned as a JSON response.

Creating the Template

Create a new folder called templates inside the detector app folder. Inside the templates folder, create another folder called detector. In the detector folder, create a new file called index.html and update as follows:

This HTML template contains a form with a textarea input for the message and a submit button. When the form is submitted, the JavaScript code (which we will create in the next step) will handle the submission, make an AJAX request to the predict view, and display the prediction result.

Creating the Base Template

Create a new file called ‘base.html’ inside the ‘detector/templates’ folder:

<

The base.html file is used to keep base code for the website that is similar to all pages.

Creating the Static Files

Create a new folder called static inside the detector app folder, and create another folder called detector inside the static folder. In the detector/static/detector folder, create a new file called script.js and add the following lines of code:

In this JavaScript file, we add an event listener to the form submission. When the form is submitted, we prevent the default submission behavior, extract the message from the textarea, and send an AJAX request to the /predict/ endpoint with the message as the request body. We then update the prediction result element with the result received from the server.

Configuring the URLs

The urls.py files are responsible for defining URL patterns and mapping them to corresponding views. Each URL pattern is associated with a specific view function, which gets executed when a user requests the matched URL. The URL patterns are defined using regular expressions or simple path converters, making it easy to capture specific parts of the URL as parameters to be passed to the view.

Now, we will modify the urls.py file in the detector app folder to as shown below:

Modify the urls.py file in the spam_detector project folder as follows:

These modifications configure the URL routing for our application. The index view is associated with the root URL (/), and the predict view is associated with the /predict/ URL.

Running the Web Application

Now, everything is set up. Run the Django development server to see the application in action:

Open your web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/. You should see the text spam detection web application. Enter a message and click “Predict” to see if it is classified as spam or not. Expected output:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/ Text spam detection web application

Enter a message and click the Predict button to get a prediction. Ham means good while spam means Spam. Expected output:

Message: “Hello, how are you?”

You can get the code of this project from GitHub.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have built a machine learning-enabled web application for detecting text spam messages using Django and Scikit-Learn. This is just a starting point, and you can expand this project by adding more features and improving the user interface. By following the steps outlined in this tutorial, you have gained experience in integrating machine learning models into web applications, and you can apply these concepts to other projects and problem domains.

Sources

– Scikit-learn official documentation
– Django official documentation

About the author

Adhinga Fredrick

Registered 22-03-2023 | Last seen 2 weeks ago 2

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