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)

Introduction


In the previous chapters, we discussed the two types of supervised learning problems: regression and classification. We looked at a number of algorithms for each type and delved into how those algorithms worked.

But there are times when these algorithms, no matter how complex they are, just don't seem to perform well on the data that we have. There could be a variety of causes and reasons – perhaps the data is not good enough, perhaps there really is no trend where we are trying to find one, or perhaps the model itself is too complex.

Wait. What? How can a model being too complex be a problem? Oh, but it can! If a model is too complex and there isn't enough data, the model could fit so well to the data that it learns even the noise and outliers, which is never what we want.

Oftentimes, where a single complex algorithm can give us a result that is way off, aggregating the results from a group of models can give us a result that's closer to the actual truth. This is because there...