Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Overview of this book

In this book, you will learn all the important machine learning algorithms that are commonly used in the field of data science. These algorithms can be used for supervised as well as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and semi-supervised learning. The algorithms that are covered in this book are linear regression, logistic regression, SVM, naïve Bayes, k-means, random forest, TensorFlow and feature engineering. In this book, you will how to use these algorithms to resolve your problems, and how they work. This book will also introduce you to natural language processing and recommendation systems, which help you to run multiple algorithms simultaneously. On completion of the book, you will know how to pick the right machine learning algorithm for clustering, classification, or regression for your problem
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we have presented hierarchical clustering, focusing our attention on the agglomerative version, which is the only one supported by scikit-learn. We discussed the philosophy, which is rather different to the one adopted by many other methods. In agglomerative clustering, the process begins by considering each sample as a single cluster and proceeds by merging the blocks until the number of desired clusters is reached. In order to perform this task, two elements are needed: a metric function (also called affinity) and a linkage criterion. The former is used to determine the distance between the elements, while the latter is a target function that is used to determine which clusters must be merged.

We also saw how to visualize this process through dendrograms using SciPy. This technique is quite useful when it's necessary to maintain a complete control of the process and the final number of clusters is initially unknown (it's easier to decide where to cut the graph)...