Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By : Stephen Klosterman
Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By: Stephen Klosterman

Overview of this book

Data Science Projects with Python is designed to give you practical guidance on industry-standard data analysis and machine learning tools, by applying them to realistic data problems. You will learn how to use pandas and Matplotlib to critically examine datasets with summary statistics and graphs, and extract the insights you seek to derive. You will build your knowledge as you prepare data using the scikit-learn package and feed it to machine learning algorithms such as regularized logistic regression and random forest. You’ll discover how to tune algorithms to provide the most accurate predictions on new and unseen data. As you progress, you’ll gain insights into the working and output of these algorithms, building your understanding of both the predictive capabilities of the models and why they make these predictions. By then end of this book, you will have the necessary skills to confidently use machine learning algorithms to perform detailed data analysis and extract meaningful insights from unstructured data.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Data Science Projects with Python
Preface

Introduction to Scikit-Learn


While pandas will save you a lot of time in loading, examining, and cleaning data, the machine learning algorithms that will enable you to do predictive modeling are located in other packages. We consider scikit-learn to be the premier machine learning package for Python, outside of deep learning. While it's impossible for any one package to offer "everything," scikit-learn comes pretty close in terms of accommodating a wide range of approaches for classification and regression, and unsupervised learning. That being said, a few other packages you should also be aware of are as follows:

SciPy:

  • Most of the packages we've used so far are actually part of the SciPy ecosystem.

  • SciPy itself offers lightweight functions for classical approaches such as linear regression and linear programming.

StatsModels:

  • More oriented toward statistics and more comfortable for users familiar with R

  • Can get p-values and confidence intervals on regression coefficients

  • Capability for time series...