Book Image

Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python

By : David Julian
Book Image

Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python

By: David Julian

Overview of this book

Machine learning is one of the fastest growing trends in modern computing. It has applications in a wide range of fields, including economics, the natural sciences, web development, and business modeling. In order to harness the power of these systems, it is essential that the practitioner develops a solid understanding of the underlying design principles. There are many reasons why machine learning models may not give accurate results. By looking at these systems from a design perspective, we gain a deeper understanding of the underlying algorithms and the optimisational methods that are available. This book will give you a solid foundation in the machine learning design process, and enable you to build customised machine learning models to solve unique problems. You may already know about, or have worked with, some of the off-the-shelf machine learning models for solving common problems such as spam detection or movie classification, but to begin solving more complex problems, it is important to adapt these models to your own specific needs. This book will give you this understanding and more.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Thinking in Machine Learning
Index

Pandas


The Pandas library builds on NumPy by introducing several useful data structures and functionalities to read and process data. Pandas is a great tool for general data munging. It easily handles common tasks such as dealing with missing data, manipulating shapes and sizes, converting between data formats and structures, and importing data from different sources.

The main data structures introduced by Pandas are:

  • Series

  • The DataFrame

  • Panel

The DataFrame is probably the most widely used. It is a two-dimensional structure that is effectively a table created from either a NumPy array, lists, dicts, or series. You can also create a DataFrame by reading from a file.

Probably the best way to get a feel for Pandas is to go through a typical use case. Let's say that we are given the task of discovering how the daily maximum temperature has changed over time. For this example, we will be working with historical weather observations from the Hobart weather station in Tasmania. Download the following...