Using older fastai (< v1.0) versions on Kaggle kernels

If you’re trying to work through fast.ai’s Introduction to Machine Learning for Coders in 2019 on a Kaggle Kernel, you’ll find that the fastai library api has diverged significantly.

As of Aug 2019, the fastai version on Kaggle kernels is >=1.0, but the course as of this writing uses fastai 0.7.0 Unfortunately, there’s no upper range specified in the requirements.txt for the 0.7.0 release so if you just try and uninstall and reinstall via !pip install fastai==0.7.0, you’ll end up pulling incompatible versions of torchvision and torchtext.

Instead, you’ll have to do something like:

!pip install 'fastai==0.7.0' 'torchtext==0.2.3' 'torchvision==0.2.0'

You’ll then be able to access the older api methods like proc_df to follow along lessons. Given the pace of development on the library though, it’s probably a good idea to familiarise youself with the newer apis by going through the newer courses like Practical Deep Learning for Coders

Happy coding!