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

Building more complex classifiers


In the previous section, we used a very simple model: a threshold on one of the dimensions. Throughout this book, you will see many other types of models, and we're not even going to cover everything that is out there.

What makes up a classification model? We can break it up into three parts:

  • The structure of the model: In this, we use a threshold on a single feature.

  • The search procedure: In this, we try every possible combination of feature and threshold.

  • The loss function: Using the loss function, we decide which of the possibilities is less bad (because we can rarely talk about the perfect solution). We can use the training error or just define this point the other way around and say that we want the best accuracy. Traditionally, people want the loss function to be minimum.

We can play around with these parts to get different results. For example, we can attempt to build a threshold that achieves minimal training error, but we will only test three values...