Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Overview of this book

In this book, you will learn all the important machine learning algorithms that are commonly used in the field of data science. These algorithms can be used for supervised as well as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and semi-supervised learning. The algorithms that are covered in this book are linear regression, logistic regression, SVM, naïve Bayes, k-means, random forest, TensorFlow and feature engineering. In this book, you will how to use these algorithms to resolve your problems, and how they work. This book will also introduce you to natural language processing and recommendation systems, which help you to run multiple algorithms simultaneously. On completion of the book, you will know how to pick the right machine learning algorithm for clustering, classification, or regression for your problem
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Elements of information theory


A machine learning problem can also be analyzed in terms of information transfer or exchange. Our dataset is composed of n features, which are considered independent (for simplicity, even if it's often a realistic assumption) drawn from n different statistical distributions. Therefore, there are n probability density functions pi(x) which must be approximated through other nqi(x) functions. In any machine learning task, it's very important to understand how two corresponding distributions diverge and what is the amount of information we lose when approximating the original dataset.

The most useful measure is called entropy:

This value is proportional to the uncertainty of X and it's measured in bits (if the logarithm has another base, this unit can change too). For many purposes, a high entropy is preferable, because it means that a certain feature contains more information. For example, in tossing a coin (two possible outcomes), H(X) = 1 bit, but if the number...