Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Alvaro Fuentes
Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Alvaro Fuentes

Overview of this book

Predictive analytics is an applied field that employs a variety of quantitative methods using data to make predictions. It involves much more than just throwing data onto a computer to build a model. This book provides practical coverage to help you understand the most important concepts of predictive analytics. Using practical, step-by-step examples, we build predictive analytics solutions while using cutting-edge Python tools and packages. The book's step-by-step approach starts by defining the problem and moves on to identifying relevant data. We will also be performing data preparation, exploring and visualizing relationships, building models, tuning, evaluating, and deploying model. Each stage has relevant practical examples and efficient Python code. You will work with models such as KNN, Random Forests, and neural networks using the most important libraries in Python's data science stack: NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Keras, Dash, and so on. In addition to hands-on code examples, you will find intuitive explanations of the inner workings of the main techniques and algorithms used in predictive analytics. By the end of this book, you will be all set to build high-performance predictive analytics solutions using Python programming.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Model Tuning and Improving Performance

This chapter is about some of the things you can do in order to improve the quality of the predictions our models make.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. In the first, we discuss hyperparameter tuning, which is the way to choose those values that define our model that are not directly learned from data. We start by discussing the simplest case, which is how to tune one parameter, and then we move on and show one of the most popular methods for optimizing more than one hyperparameter at the same time—we use the concept of cross-validation and k-fold cross-validation in this section, so it is important that you have learned these concepts from the previous chapters.

In the second section, we show how sometimes trying a different model can improve the quality of our predictions. Then, we use some of the information we got...