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 introduced ensembles. An ensemble is a combination of models that performs better than each of its components. We discussed three methods of training ensembles. Bootstrap aggregating, or bagging, can reduce the variance of an estimator; bagging uses bootstrap resampling to create multiple variants of the training set. The predictions of models trained on these variants are then averaged. Bagged decision trees are called random forests. Boosting is an ensemble meta-estimator that reduces the bias of its base estimators. AdaBoost is a popular boosting algorithm that iteratively trains estimators on training data that is weighted according to the previous estimators' errors. Finally, in stacking a meta-estimator learns to combine the predictions of heterogeneous base estimators.