Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By : Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By: Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti • Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim • Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
Index

Introducing decision tree classifiers


Decision tree classifiers produce rules in simple English sentences, which can easily be interpreted and presented to senior management without any editing. Decision trees can be applied to either classification or regression problems. Based on features in data, decision tree models learn a series of questions to infer the class labels of samples.

In the following figure, simple recursive decision rules have been asked by a programmer himself to do relevant actions. The actions would be based on the provided answers for each question, whether yes or no.

Terminology used in decision trees

Decision Trees do not have much machinery as compared with logistic regression. Here we have a few metrics to study. We will majorly focus on impurity measures; decision trees split variables recursively based on set impurity criteria until they reach some stopping criteria (minimum observations per terminal node, minimum observations for split at any node, and so on):

  • Entropy...