Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Overview of this book

Machine learning, the field of building systems that learn from data, is exploding on the Web and elsewhere. Python is a wonderful language in which to develop machine learning applications. As a dynamic language, it allows for fast exploration and experimentation and an increasing number of machine learning libraries are developed for Python.Building Machine Learning system with Python shows you exactly how to find patterns through raw data. The book starts by brushing up on your Python ML knowledge and introducing libraries, and then moves on to more serious projects on datasets, Modelling, Recommendations, improving recommendations through examples and sailing through sound and image processing in detail. Using open-source tools and libraries, readers will learn how to apply methods to text, images, and sounds. You will also learn how to evaluate, compare, and choose machine learning techniques. Written for Python programmers, Building Machine Learning Systems with Python teaches you how to use open-source libraries to solve real problems with machine learning. The book is based on real-world examples that the user can build on. Readers will learn how to write programs that classify the quality of StackOverflow answers or whether a music file is Jazz or Metal. They will learn regression, which is demonstrated on how to recommend movies to users. Advanced topics such as topic modeling (finding a text's most important topics), basket analysis, and cloud computing are covered as well as many other interesting aspects.Building Machine Learning Systems with Python will give you the tools and understanding required to build your own systems, which are tailored to solve your problems.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Building Machine Learning Systems with Python
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Looking behind accuracy – precision and recall


Let us step back and think again what we are trying to achieve here. Actually, we do not need a classifier that perfectly predicts good and bad answers, as we measured it until now using accuracy. If we can tune the classifier to be particularly good in predicting one class, we could adapt the feedback to the user accordingly. If we had a classifier, for example, that was always right when it predicted an answer to be bad, we would give no feedback until the classifier detected the answer to be bad. Contrariwise, if the classifier succeeded in predicting answers to be always good, we could show helpful comments to the user at the beginning and remove them when the classifier said that the answer is a good one.

To find out which situation we are in here, we have to understand how to measure precision and recall. To understand this, we have to look into the four distinct classification results as they are described in the following table:

  

Classified...