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)

Decision Trees and Ensemble Learning

In this chapter, we're going to discuss Binary Decision Trees and ensemble methods. Even though they're probably not the most common methods for classification, they offer a good level of simplicity and can be adopted for many tasks that don't require a high level of complexity. They're also quite useful when it's necessary to show how a decision process works because they are based on a structure that can be easily shown in presentations and described step by step.

Ensemble methods are a powerful alternative to complex algorithms because they try to exploit the statistical concept of a majority vote. Many weak learners can be trained to capture different elements and make their own predictions, which are not globally optimal, but using a sufficient number of elements, it's statistically probable that a majority...