The senior bar. Set by the people who maintain scikit-learn.
The Expert Practitioner Certification targets senior data scientists shipping to production. Custom estimators, calibration, MLOps, and debugging teammate models.
expert practitioner
Seven competencies of a senior data scientist.
The Expert certification ensures certified professionals have production-level mastery of scikit-learn, including custom estimators, calibration, and team-level diagnostics.
Expert-level Machine Learning
In-depth algorithmic knowledge and awareness of emerging trends.
Algorithm Development
Custom ML algorithm implementation using the scikit-learn estimator API.
Model Deployment
Production expertise and MLOps: serialization, serving, and monitoring.
Research and Innovation
Independent research capability and ability to apply novel methods.
Strategic Planning
Long-term data science strategy involvement and project scoping.
Strategic Vision
Understanding industry trends and positioning ML work within broader business context.
Model Diagnostics
Pipeline troubleshooting for team members — reading others’ code, finding failure modes, proposing fixes.
Production-grade scikit-learn. Custom estimators, calibration, MLOps, and diagnosing pipelines you didn’t write.
from sklearn.metrics import brier_score_loss, roc_auc_score
brier = brier_score_loss(y, p) # calibration
auc = roc_auc_score(y, p) # ranking power from sklearn.calibration import CalibratedClassifierCV
cal = CalibratedClassifierCV(
estimator=clf,
method="isotonic",
cv=5,
).fit(X_tr, y_tr) from sklearn.inspection import (
PartialDependenceDisplay, permutation_importance,
)
PartialDependenceDisplay.from_estimator(
clf, X, features=[0, 1],
) import pandas as pd
df["sales_lag_7"] = (
df.groupby("store")["sales"].shift(7)
) from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV
from sklearn.metrics import make_scorer, brier_score_loss
scorer = make_scorer(
brier_score_loss,
greater_is_better=False,
needs_proba=True,
)
GridSearchCV(pipe, grid, scoring=scorer) import skops.io as sio
sio.dump(model, "model.skops")
loaded = sio.load(
"model.skops", trusted=True,
) Three levels. You are on the third.
Three certifications, each matching a level and a typical data scientist career path.
Associate Practitioner
Junior data scientist
Fundamental ML, preprocessing, evaluation
Professional
Mid-level
Regularization, ensembles, feature engineering, nested CV
Expert
Senior practitioner
Custom estimators, calibration, MLOps, diagnostics
Get training with Skolar.
The Expert track on Skolar covers custom estimators, calibration, MLOps patterns, and model diagnostics, with notebooks and practice written by the scikit-learn team.
Logistics, plain.
Everything you need to plan your sitting, in six lines.
Questions we get a lot.
Are there prerequisites?
What are the labs?
What happens if I do not pass?
Is the credential verifiable?
Does it expire?
The credential the maintainers sign.
120 minutes. $499 USD. Multiple-choice plus two hands-on labs, a credential issued by the people who ship scikit-learn.