Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms

Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms

Overview of this book

Machine learning is a subset of AI that aims to make modern-day computer systems smarter and more intelligent. The real power of machine learning resides in its algorithms, which make even the most difficult things capable of being handled by machines. However, with the advancement in the technology and requirements of data, machines will have to be smarter than they are today to meet the overwhelming data needs; mastering these algorithms and using them optimally is the need of the hour. Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms is your complete guide to quickly getting to grips with popular machine learning algorithms. You will be introduced to the most widely used algorithms in supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised machine learning, and will learn how to use them in the best possible manner. Ranging from Bayesian models to the MCMC algorithm to Hidden Markov models, this book will teach you how to extract features from your dataset and perform dimensionality reduction by making use of Python-based libraries such as scikit-learn v0.19.1. You will also learn how to use Keras and TensorFlow 1.x to train effective neural networks. If you are looking for a single resource to study, implement, and solve end-to-end machine learning problems and use-cases, this is the book you need.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
13
Deep Belief Networks
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we presented some fundamental clustering algorithms. We started with KNN, which is an instance-based method that restructures the dataset to find the most similar samples given a query point. We discussed three approaches: a naive one, which is also the most expensive in terms of computational complexity, and two strategies based respectively on the construction of a KD Tree and a Ball Tree. These two data structures can dramatically improve performance even when the number of samples is very large.

The next topic was a classic algorithm: K-means, which is a symmetric partitioning strategy, comparable to a Gaussian mixture with variances close to zero, that can solve many real-life problems. We discussed both a vanilla algorithm, which wasn't able to find a valid sub-optimal solution, and an optimized initialization method, called K-means++, which was able to speed up the convergence towards solutions quite close to the global minimum. In the same section, we also...