Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The discovery of information through data clustering and classification is becoming a key differentiator for competitive organizations. Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, engineering design, logistics, manufacturing, and trading strategies, to detection of genetic anomalies. The book is your one stop guide that introduces you to the functional capabilities of the Scala programming language that are critical to the creation of machine learning algorithms such as dependency injection and implicits. You start by learning data preprocessing and filtering techniques. Following this, you'll move on to unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and dimension reduction, followed by probabilistic graphical models such as Naïve Bayes, hidden Markov models and Monte Carlo inference. Further, it covers the discriminative algorithms such as linear, logistic regression with regularization, kernelization, support vector machines, neural networks, and deep learning. You’ll move on to evolutionary computing, multibandit algorithms, and reinforcement learning. Finally, the book includes a comprehensive overview of parallel computing in Scala and Akka followed by a description of Apache Spark and its ML library. With updated codes based on the latest version of Scala and comprehensive examples, this book will ensure that you have more than just a solid fundamental knowledge in machine learning with Scala.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Scala for Machine Learning Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Benefits and limitations


The advantages and disadvantages of neural networks depend on which other machine learning methods they are compared to. However, neural-network-based classifiers, particularly the multilayer perceptron using error backpropagation, have some obvious advantages:

  • The mathematical foundation of a neural network does not require expertise in dynamic programming or linear algebra, beyond the basic gradient descent algorithm.

  • A neural network can perform tasks that a linear algorithm cannot.

  • MLP is usually reliable for highly dynamic and nonlinear processes. Contrary to the support vector machines, they do not require us to increase the problem dimension through kernelization.

  • MLP does not make any assumption on linearity, variable independence, or normality.

  • The execution of training of the MLP lends itself to concurrent processing quite well for online training. In most architecture, the algorithm can continue even if a node in the network fails (refer to Chapter 17, Apache...