Book Image

Data Science Algorithms in a Week

By : Dávid Natingga
Book Image

Data Science Algorithms in a Week

By: Dávid Natingga

Overview of this book

<p>Machine learning applications are highly automated and self-modifying, and they continue to improve over time with minimal human intervention as they learn with more data. To address the complex nature of various real-world data problems, specialized machine learning algorithms have been developed that solve these problems perfectly. Data science helps you gain new knowledge from existing data through algorithmic and statistical analysis.</p> <p>This book will address the problems related to accurate and efficient data classification and prediction. Over the course of 7 days, you will be introduced to seven algorithms, along with exercises that will help you learn different aspects of machine learning. You will see how to pre-cluster your data to optimize and classify it for large datasets. You will then find out how to predict data based on the existing trends in your datasets.</p> <p>This book covers algorithms such as: k-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forest, k-Means, Regression, and Time-series. On completion of the book, you will understand which machine learning algorithm to pick for clustering, classification, or regression and which is best suited for your problem.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Glossary of Algorithms and Methods in Data Science

Summary

The k-nearest neighbor algorithm is a classification algorithm that assigns to a given data point the majority class among the k-nearest neighbors. The distance between two points is measured by a metric. Examples of distances include: Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, Minkowski distance, Hamming distance, Mahalanobis distance, Tanimoto distance, Jaccard distance, tangential distance, and cosine distance. Experiments with various parameters and cross-validation can help to establish which parameter k and which metric should be used.

The dimensionality and position of a data point in the space are determined by its qualities. A large number of dimensions can result in low accuracy of the k-NN algorithm. Reducing the dimensions of qualities of smaller importance can increase accuracy. Similarly, to increase accuracy further, distances for each dimension should be scaled according to the importance of the quality of that dimension.