Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Trent Hauck
Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Trent Hauck

Overview of this book

Python is quickly becoming the go-to language for analysts and data scientists due to its simplicity and flexibility, and within the Python data space, scikit-learn is the unequivocal choice for machine learning. This book includes walk throughs and solutions to the common as well as the not-so-common problems in machine learning, and how scikit-learn can be leveraged to perform various machine learning tasks effectively. The second edition begins with taking you through recipes on evaluating the statistical properties of data and generates synthetic data for machine learning modelling. As you progress through the chapters, you will comes across recipes that will teach you to implement techniques like data pre-processing, linear regression, logistic regression, K-NN, Naïve Bayes, classification, decision trees, Ensembles and much more. Furthermore, you’ll learn to optimize your models with multi-class classification, cross validation, model evaluation and dive deeper in to implementing deep learning with scikit-learn. Along with covering the enhanced features on model section, API and new features like classifiers, regressors and estimators the book also contains recipes on evaluating and fine-tuning the performance of your model. By the end of this book, you will have explored plethora of features offered by scikit-learn for Python to solve any machine learning problem you come across.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Using Gaussian processes for regression

In this recipe, we'll use a Gaussian process for regression. In the linear models section, we will see how representing prior information on the coefficients was possible using Bayesian ridge regression.

With a Gaussian process, it's about the variance and not the mean. However, with a Gaussian process, we assume the mean is 0, so it's the covariance function we'll need to specify.

The basic setup is similar to how a prior can be put on the coefficients in a typical regression problem. With a Gaussian process, a prior can be put on the functional form of the data, and it's the covariance between the data points that is used to model the data, and therefore, must fit the data.

A big advantage of Gaussian processes is that they can predict probabilistically: you can obtain confidence bounds on your predictions. Additionally...