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

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed our first unsupervised learning task, clustering. Clustering is used to discover structures in unlabeled data. We learned about the K-means clustering algorithm, which iteratively assigns instances to clusters and refines the positions of the cluster centroids. While K-means learns from experience without supervision, its performance is still measurable; we learned to use distortion and the silhouette coefficient to evaluate clusters. We applied K-means to two different problems. First, we used K-means for image quantizationK a compression technique that represents a range of colors with a single color. We also used K-means to learn features in a semi-supervised image classification problem.

In the next chapter we will discuss another unsupervised learning task called dimensionality reduction. Like the semi-supervised feature representations we created to classify images of cats and dogs, dimensionality reduction can be used to reduce the dimensions of...