Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Overview of this book

Machine learning, the field of building systems that learn from data, is exploding on the Web and elsewhere. Python is a wonderful language in which to develop machine learning applications. As a dynamic language, it allows for fast exploration and experimentation and an increasing number of machine learning libraries are developed for Python.Building Machine Learning system with Python shows you exactly how to find patterns through raw data. The book starts by brushing up on your Python ML knowledge and introducing libraries, and then moves on to more serious projects on datasets, Modelling, Recommendations, improving recommendations through examples and sailing through sound and image processing in detail. Using open-source tools and libraries, readers will learn how to apply methods to text, images, and sounds. You will also learn how to evaluate, compare, and choose machine learning techniques. Written for Python programmers, Building Machine Learning Systems with Python teaches you how to use open-source libraries to solve real problems with machine learning. The book is based on real-world examples that the user can build on. Readers will learn how to write programs that classify the quality of StackOverflow answers or whether a music file is Jazz or Metal. They will learn regression, which is demonstrated on how to recommend movies to users. Advanced topics such as topic modeling (finding a text's most important topics), basket analysis, and cloud computing are covered as well as many other interesting aspects.Building Machine Learning Systems with Python will give you the tools and understanding required to build your own systems, which are tailored to solve your problems.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Building Machine Learning Systems with Python
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Multidimensional scaling (MDS)


On one hand, PCA tries to use optimization for retained variance, and on the other hand, MDS tries to retain the relative distances as much as possible when reducing the dimensions. This is useful when we have a high-dimensional dataset and want to get a visual impression.

MDS does not care about the data points themselves; instead, it is interested in the dissimilarities between pairs of data points and interprets these as distances. The first thing the MDS algorithm is doing is, therefore, taking all the data points of dimension and calculates a distance matrix using a distance function , which measures the (most of the time, Euclidean) distance in the original feature space:

Now, MDS tries to position the individual data points in the lower dimensional space such that the new distance there resembles as much as possible the distances in the original space. As MDS is often used for visualization, the choice of the lower dimension is most of the time two or...