Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Trent Hauck
Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Trent Hauck

Overview of this book

Python is quickly becoming the go-to language for analysts and data scientists due to its simplicity and flexibility, and within the Python data space, scikit-learn is the unequivocal choice for machine learning. This book includes walk throughs and solutions to the common as well as the not-so-common problems in machine learning, and how scikit-learn can be leveraged to perform various machine learning tasks effectively. The second edition begins with taking you through recipes on evaluating the statistical properties of data and generates synthetic data for machine learning modelling. As you progress through the chapters, you will comes across recipes that will teach you to implement techniques like data pre-processing, linear regression, logistic regression, K-NN, Naïve Bayes, classification, decision trees, Ensembles and much more. Furthermore, you’ll learn to optimize your models with multi-class classification, cross validation, model evaluation and dive deeper in to implementing deep learning with scikit-learn. Along with covering the enhanced features on model section, API and new features like classifiers, regressors and estimators the book also contains recipes on evaluating and fine-tuning the performance of your model. By the end of this book, you will have explored plethora of features offered by scikit-learn for Python to solve any machine learning problem you come across.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Feature selection

This recipe, along with the two following it, will be centered around automatic feature selection. I like to think of this as the feature analog of parameter tuning. In the same way that we cross-validate to find an appropriately general parameter, we can find an appropriately general subset of features. This will involve several different methods.
The simplest idea is univariate selection. The other methods involve working with a combination of features.

An added benefit of feature selection is that it can ease the burden on the data collection. Imagine that you have built a model on a very small subset of the data. If all goes well, you might want to scale up to predict the model on the entire subset of data. If this is the case, you can ease the engineering effort of data collection at that scale.

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