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

The divergences


Fundamentally,ces are algorithms that compute the similarity between two probability distributions. In the field of information theory, divergences are used to estimate the minimum discrimination information.

Although divergences are not usually defined as dimension-reduction techniques, they are a vital tool for measuring the redundancy of information between features.

Let's consider a set of observations: X with a feature set {fi}. Two features that are highly correlated generate redundant information (or information gains). Therefore, it is conceivable to remove one of these two features from the training set without incurring a loss of information.

The list of divergences is quite extensive and includes the following methods:

  • Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence estimates the similarity between two probability distributions [5:1]

  • Jensen-Shannon metric extends the KL formula with symmetrization and boundary values [5:2]

  • Mutual information, based on KL, measures the mutual dependence...