Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By : Pratap Dangeti
Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By: Pratap Dangeti

Overview of this book

Complex statistics in machine learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong machine learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement. This book will teach you all it takes to perform the complex statistical computations that are required for machine learning. You will gain information on the statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. You will see real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of machine learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will come across programs for performing tasks such as modeling, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, working with vectors, matrices, and more. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the statistics required for machine learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Collaborative filtering


Collaborative filtering is a form of wisdom-of-the-crowd approach, where the set of preferences of many users with respect to items is used to generate estimated preferences of users for items with which they have not yet rated/reviewed. It works on the notion of similarity. Collaborative filtering is a methodology in which similar users and their ratings are determined not by similar age and so on, but by similar preferences exhibited by users, such as similar movies watched, rated, and so on.

Advantages of collaborative filtering over content-based filtering

Collaborative filtering provides many advantages over content-based filtering. A few of them are as follows:

  • Not required to understand item content: The content of the items does not necessarily tell the whole story, such as movie type/genre, and so on.
  • No item cold-start problem: Even when no information on an item is available, we still can predict the item rating without waiting for a user to purchase it.
  • Captures...