Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By : Gavin Hackeling
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By: Gavin Hackeling

Overview of this book

Machine learning is the buzzword bringing computer science and statistics together to build smart and efficient models. Using powerful algorithms and techniques offered by machine learning you can automate any analytical model. This book examines a variety of machine learning models including popular machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, naive Bayes, k-means, decision trees, and artificial neural networks. It discusses data preprocessing, hyperparameter optimization, and ensemble methods. You will build systems that classify documents, recognize images, detect ads, and more. You will learn to use scikit-learn’s API to extract features from categorical variables, text and images; evaluate model performance, and develop an intuition for how to improve your model’s performance. By the end of this book, you will master all required concepts of scikit-learn to build efficient models at work to carry out advanced tasks with the practical approach.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
From Decision Trees to Random Forests and Other Ensemble Methods
Index

An introduction to scikit-learn


Since its release in 2007, scikit-learn has become one of the most popular machine learning libraries. scikit-learn provides algorithms for machine learning tasks including classification, regression, dimensionality reduction, and clustering. It also provides modules for pre-processing data, extracting features, optimizing hyperparameters, and evaluating models.

scikit-learn is built on the popular Python libraries NumPy and SciPy. NumPy extends Python to support efficient operations on large arrays and multi-dimensional matrices. SciPy provides modules for scientific computing. The visualization library matplotlib is often used in conjunction with scikit-learn.

scikit-learn is popular for academic research because its API is well-documented, easy-to-use, and versatile. Developers can use scikit-learn to experiment with different algorithms by changing only a few lines of code. scikit-learn wraps some popular implementations of machine learning algorithms, such as LIBSVM and LIBLINEAR. Other Python libraries, including NLTK, include wrappers for scikit-learn. scikit-learn also includes a variety of datasets, allowing developers to focus on algorithms rather than obtaining and cleaning data.

Licensed under the permissive BSD license, scikit-learn can be used in commercial applications without restrictions. Many of scikit-learn's algorithms are fast and scalable to all but massive datasets. Finally, scikit-learn is noted for its reliability; much of the library is covered by automated tests.