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

Summary


This concludes the first of two chapters dedicated to reinforcement learning. In this chapter, we learned to balance exploration (learning) and exploitation (executing) by:

  • Managing and reducing the confidence interval across the arms

  • Applying the simple epsilon-greedy selection for exploring underplayed arms

  • Leveraging the concept of probability matching through Thompson sampling for context-free bandits

  • Using Upper Confidence Bounds to model the confidence interval as a function of the number of plays

The K-armed bandit problem is a viable solution for simple problems in which the interaction between the actor (player) and the environment (bandit) relies on a single state and immediate reward.

The next chapter introduces alternative approaches to multiarmed bandits for more complex, multi-state problems using value-actions and the Markovian decision process.