Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By : Gavin Hackeling
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By: Gavin Hackeling

Overview of this book

Machine learning is the buzzword bringing computer science and statistics together to build smart and efficient models. Using powerful algorithms and techniques offered by machine learning you can automate any analytical model. This book examines a variety of machine learning models including popular machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, naive Bayes, k-means, decision trees, and artificial neural networks. It discusses data preprocessing, hyperparameter optimization, and ensemble methods. You will build systems that classify documents, recognize images, detect ads, and more. You will learn to use scikit-learn’s API to extract features from categorical variables, text and images; evaluate model performance, and develop an intuition for how to improve your model’s performance. By the end of this book, you will master all required concepts of scikit-learn to build efficient models at work to carry out advanced tasks with the practical approach.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
From Decision Trees to Random Forests and Other Ensemble Methods
Index

Installing pandas, Pillow, NLTK, and matplotlib


pandas is an open source library that provides data structures and analysis tools for Python. pandas is a powerful library, and several books describe how to use pandas for data analysis. We will use a few of pandas's convenient tools for importing data and calculating summary statistics. Pillow is a fork of the Python Imaging Library, which provides a variety of image processing features. NLTK is a library for working with human language. As for scikit-learn, pip is the preferred installation method for pandas, Pillow, and NLTK. Execute the following command in a terminal emulator:

$ pip install pandas pillow nltk

Matplotlib is a library for easily creating plots, histograms, and other charts with Python. We will use it to visualize training data and models. Matplotlib has several dependencies. Like pandas, matplotlib depends on NumPy, which should already be installed. On Ubuntu 16.04, matplotlib and its dependencies can be installed with:

$ sudo apt install python-matplotlib  

Binaries for Mac OS and Windows 10 can be downloaded from http://matplotlib.org/downloads.html.