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

Using logistic regression


Contrary to its name, logistic regression is a classification method, and is very powerful when it comes to text-based classification. It achieves this by first performing regression on a logistic function, hence the name.

A bit of math with a small example

To get an initial understanding of the way logistic regression works, let us first take a look at the following example, where we have an artificial feature value at the X axis plotted with the corresponding class range, either 0 or 1. As we can see, the data is so noisy that classes overlap in the feature value range between 1 and 6. Therefore, it is better to not directly model the discrete classes, but rather the probability that a feature value belongs to class 1, P(X). Once we possess such a model, we could then predict class 1 if P(X) > 0.5 or class 0 otherwise:

Mathematically, it is always difficult to model something that has a finite range, as is the case here with our discrete labels 0 and 1. We can...