Use sklearn’s Extra Trees to determine if a mushroom is edible

One food that I really like is mushrooms. I buy them in the grocery store in faith that the mushrooms that have been grown for the shop are edible. For those people who like to forage in the countryside for mushrooms, its a good idea to study them and to determine which ones are edible and which ones are not.

This month’s Kaggle playground competition is a binary classification problem where the student of data science must determine whether a mushroom is edible or poisonous. This is a worthwhile problem to work on because I believe there are more poisonous mushrooms than edible ones.

It is so important to ensure that mushrooms that have been made for a meal are edible because eating poisonous mushrooms could be deadly. As a case in point, an Australian woman, Erin Patterson, cooked a meal of mushrooms for which three people died. The outcome of this ill fated meal is that Erin Patterson has been charged with three counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder. The three charges of murder were to do with the three individuals who died after eating the mushrooms. The five attempted charges of attempted murder relate to the one survivor of the meal and her estranged husband, who had become ill a number of times after eating food that Erin Patterson had cooked for him.