Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Machine learning has gained tremendous popularity for its powerful and fast predictions with large datasets. However, the true forces behind its powerful output are the complex algorithms involving substantial statistical analysis that churn large datasets and generate substantial insight. This second edition of Machine Learning Algorithms walks you through prominent development outcomes that have taken place relating to machine learning algorithms, which constitute major contributions to the machine learning process and help you to strengthen and master statistical interpretation across the areas of supervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. Once the core concepts of an algorithm have been covered, you’ll explore real-world examples based on the most diffused libraries, such as scikit-learn, NLTK, TensorFlow, and Keras. You will discover new topics such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), Bayesian regression, discriminant analysis, advanced clustering, and gaussian mixture. By the end of this book, you will have studied machine learning algorithms and be able to put them into production to make your machine learning applications more innovative.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the important concepts of linear models and described how linear regression works. In particular, we focused on the basic model and its main variants: Lasso, Ridge, and ElasticNet. They don't modify the internal dynamics, but work as normalizers for the weights to avoid common problems when the dataset contains unscaled samples. These penalties have specific peculiarities. While Lasso promotes sparsity, Ridge tries to find a minimum with the constraint that the weights must lie within a circle centered at the origin (whose radius is parametrized to increase/decrease the normalization strength). ElasticNet is a mix of both these techniques, and it tries to find a minimum where the weights are small enough and a certain degree of sparsity is achieved.

We also discussed advanced techniques such as RANSAC, which allows us to cope with outliers...