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

Standardizing features


We learned in the previous chapter that many learning algorithms perform better when they are trained on standardized data. Recall that standardized data has zero mean and unit variance. An explanatory variable with zero mean is centered about the origin; its average value is zero. A feature vector has unit variance when the variances of its features are all of the same order of magnitude. If one feature's variance is orders of magnitude greater than the variances of the other features, that feature may dominate the learning algorithm and prevent it from learning from the other variables. Some learning algorithms also converge to the optimal parameter values more slowly when data is not standardized. In addition to the StandardScaler transformer we used in the previous chapter, the scale function from the preprocessing module can be used to standardize a dataset along any axis:

# In[1]:
from sklearn import preprocessing
import numpy as np
X = np.array([
 [0., 0., 5...