Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with Python

By : Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur
Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with Python

By: Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur

Overview of this book

Machine learning—the ability of a machine to give right answers based on input data—has revolutionized the way we do business. Applied Supervised Learning with Python provides a rich understanding of how you can apply machine learning techniques in your data science projects using Python. You'll explore Jupyter Notebooks, the technology used commonly in academic and commercial circles with in-line code running support. With the help of fun examples, you'll gain experience working on the Python machine learning toolkit—from performing basic data cleaning and processing to working with a range of regression and classification algorithms. Once you’ve grasped the basics, you'll learn how to build and train your own models using advanced techniques such as decision trees, ensemble modeling, validation, and error metrics. You'll also learn data visualization techniques using powerful Python libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn. This book also covers ensemble modeling and random forest classifiers along with other methods for combining results from multiple models, and concludes by delving into cross-validation to test your algorithm and check how well the model works on unseen data. By the end of this book, you'll be equipped to not only work with machine learning algorithms, but also be able to create some of your own!
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we took our first big leap into constructing machine learning models and making predictions with labeled datasets. We began our analysis by looking at a variety of different ways to construct linear models, starting with the precise least squares method, which is very good when modeling small amounts of data that can be processed using the available computer memory. The performance of our vanilla linear model was improved using dummy variables, which we created from categorical variables, adding additional features and context to the model. We then used linear regression analysis with a parabolic model to further improve performance, fitting a more natural curve to the dataset. We also implemented the gradient descent algorithm, which we noticed, while not as precise as the least squares method was for our limited dataset, was most powerful when the dataset cannot be processed on the resources available on the system.

Finally, we investigated the use of autoregression...