Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Alvaro Fuentes
Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Alvaro Fuentes

Overview of this book

Predictive analytics is an applied field that employs a variety of quantitative methods using data to make predictions. It involves much more than just throwing data onto a computer to build a model. This book provides practical coverage to help you understand the most important concepts of predictive analytics. Using practical, step-by-step examples, we build predictive analytics solutions while using cutting-edge Python tools and packages. The book's step-by-step approach starts by defining the problem and moves on to identifying relevant data. We will also be performing data preparation, exploring and visualizing relationships, building models, tuning, evaluating, and deploying model. Each stage has relevant practical examples and efficient Python code. You will work with models such as KNN, Random Forests, and neural networks using the most important libraries in Python's data science stack: NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Keras, Dash, and so on. In addition to hands-on code examples, you will find intuitive explanations of the inner workings of the main techniques and algorithms used in predictive analytics. By the end of this book, you will be all set to build high-performance predictive analytics solutions using Python programming.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Training versus testing error

The point of splitting the dataset into training and testing sets was to simulate the situation of using the model to make predictions on data the model has not seen. As we said before, the whole point is to generalize what we have learned from the observed data. The training MSE (or any metric calculated on the training dataset) may give us a biased view of the performance of our model, especially because of the possibility of overfitting. The metrics of performance we get from the training dataset will tend to be too optimistic. Let's take a look again at our illustration of overfitting:

If we calculate the training MSE for these three cases, we will definitely get the lowest one (hence the best) for the third model, the polynomial with 16 degrees; as we see, the model touches many points, making the error for those points exactly 0. However...