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

Stacking


Stacking is an approach to creating ensembles; it uses a meta-estimator to combine the predictions of base estimators. Sometimes called blending, stacking adds a second supervised learning problem: the meta-estimator must be trained to use the predictions of the base estimators to predict the value of the response variable. To train a stacked ensemble, first use the training set to train the base estimators. Unlike bagging and boosting, stacking can use different types of base estimators; a random forest could be combined with a logistic regression classifier, for example. The base estimators' predictions and the ground truth are then used as the training set for the meta-estimator. The meta-estimator can learn to combine the base estimators' predictions in more complex ways than voting or averaging. scikit-learn does not implement a stacking meta-estimator, but we can extend the BaseEstimator class to create our own. In this example, we use a single decision tree as the meta-estimator...