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)

Overfitting and Underfitting


Let's say we fit a supervised learning algorithm to our data and subsequently use the model to perform a prediction on a hold-out validation set. The performance of this model will be considered to be good based on how well it generalizes, that is, the predictions it makes for data points in an independent validation dataset.

Sometimes we find that the model is not able to make accurate predictions and gives poor performance on the validation data. This poor performance can be the result of a model that is too simple to model the data appropriately, or a model that is too complex to generalize to the validation dataset. In the former case, the model has a high bias and results in underfitting, while in the latter case, the model has a high variance and results in overfitting.

Bias

The bias in the prediction of a machine learning model represents the difference between the predicted values and the true values. A model is said to have a high bias if the average predicted...