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

Slimming the classifier


It is always worth looking at the actual contributions of the individual features. For logistic regression, we can directly take the learned coefficients (clf.coef_) to get an impression of the feature's impact. The higher the coefficient of a feature is, the more the feature plays a role in determining whether the post is good or not. Consequently, negative coefficients tell us that the higher values for the corresponding features indicate a stronger signal for the post to be classified as bad:

We see that LinkCount and NumExclams have the biggest impact on the overall classification decision, while NumImages and AvgSentLen play a rather minor role. While the feature importance overall makes sense intuitively, it is surprising that NumImages is basically ignored. Normally, answers containing images are always rated high. In reality, however, answers very rarely have images. So although in principal it is a very powerful feature, it is too sparse to be of any value...