Book Image

Data Science with Python

By : Rohan Chopra, Aaron England, Mohamed Noordeen Alaudeen
Book Image

Data Science with Python

By: Rohan Chopra, Aaron England, Mohamed Noordeen Alaudeen

Overview of this book

Data Science with Python begins by introducing you to data science and teaches you to install the packages you need to create a data science coding environment. You will learn three major techniques in machine learning: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. You will also explore basic classification and regression techniques, such as support vector machines, decision trees, and logistic regression. As you make your way through the book, you will understand the basic functions, data structures, and syntax of the Python language that are used to handle large datasets with ease. You will learn about NumPy and pandas libraries for matrix calculations and data manipulation, discover how to use Matplotlib to create highly customizable visualizations, and apply the boosting algorithm XGBoost to make predictions. In the concluding chapters, you will explore convolutional neural networks (CNNs), deep learning algorithms used to predict what is in an image. You will also understand how to feed human sentences to a neural network, make the model process contextual information, and create human language processing systems to predict the outcome. By the end of this book, you will be able to understand and implement any new data science algorithm and have the confidence to experiment with tools or libraries other than those covered in the book.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Categorical Variables

A categorical variable is one whose values can be represented in different categories. Examples are colours of a ball, breed of dogs, and zip codes. Mapping these categorical variables in a single dimension creates a sort of dependence on each other, which is incorrect. Even though these categorical variables do not have an order or dependence, inputting them to a neural network as a single feature makes the neural network create dependence between these variables depending on the order, whereas in reality, the order does not mean anything. In this section, we will learn about the ways in which can fix this issue and train effective models.

One-hot Encoding

The easiest and the most widely used method of mapping categorical variables is to use one-hot encoding. Using this method, we convert a categorical feature into features equal to the number of categories in the feature.

Figure 5.31: Categorical feature conversion
Figure 5.31: Categorical feature conversion

Use the following steps to convert...