Error in importing sidekit in python on ubuntu

Question

I'm tyring to use sidekit toolkit for speaker recognition and I have installed libsvm for Ubuntu, I'm using anaconda 3.5. When I try to import sidekit I get following import error

>>> import sidekit
>>> import theano
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/__init__.py", 
line 141, in <module>
from sidekit.libsvm import *
File "/home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/libsvm/__init__.py", 
line 37, in <module>
from sidekit.libsvm.svm import *
File "/home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/libsvm/svm.py", 
line 324, in <module>
fillprototype(libsvm.svm_get_sv_indices, None, [POINTER(svm_model), POINTER(c_int)])
File "/home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/ctypes/__init__.py", line 360, in __getattr__
func = self.__getitem__(name)
File "/home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/ctypes/__init__.py", line 365, in __getitem__
func = self._FuncPtr((name_or_ordinal, self))
AttributeError: /usr/lib/libsvm.so.3: undefined symbol: svm_get_sv_indices

Answer 1

I had the same problem when I installed Sidekit some months ago.

1: If you want to use Sidekit for systems that do not involve SVMs (gmm-ubm, i-vectors etc.), then you can avoid the problem by editing __init__.py to not import libsvm. In your case, it is located here: /home/shivam/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/__init__.py. Add libsvm_loaded = False on line 140 (right above if libsvm_loaded:), and libsvm will not be imported.

2: If you want to be able to make SVM-based systems (such as in the example script rsr2015_svm_gmm.py), the Sidekit documentation tells you to (after libsvm installation) copy libsvm.so.2 into .../python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/libsvm/.

If import sidekit still gives the same error, check line 125 of .../python3.5/site-packages/sidekit/__init__.py and make sure it says libsvm = CDLL(os.path.join(dirname, 'libsvm.so.2'))

Note that __init__.py and will be replaced if you are to update Sidekit.

Answer 2

I also got this exact same error when trying to import sidekit. I tried installing every libsvm package I could find (both Python and apt-get), but the only way I could fix this error was to download and compile libsvm from source. Its not as bad as it sounds - its a tiny library, it seems - only took 5 seconds to compile.

Assuming you have git installed (apt-get install git-core), the total set of commands I used were:

cd ~/ && \
git clone https://github.com/cjlin1/libsvm.git && \
cd libsvm && \
make && \
cd python && \
make && \
cp ~/libsvm/libsvm.so.2 /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sidekit/libsvm/ && \
rm -rf ~/libsvm

Note: I realise that your error mentions libsvm.so.3 - mine did too, but using libsvm.so.2 worked for me...so that seems to be the only file that contains svm_get_sv_indices!