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)

Classification trees

Classification trees are also very popular because they are very transparent and easy to understand and it is straightforward to explain how they produce the predictions. They belong to the category of non-parametric methods, and they can be used for regression and classification tasks. The way they produce the predictions is by creating a series of rules that are applied consecutively until we arrive at a "leaf" node in the tree that contains the classification. An example will make this more clear.

For visualizing scikit-learn trees in your Jupyter Notebook, you will have to install graphviz. In the Anaconda prompt with your virtual environment activated, install the graphviz and pydotplus packages: conda install graphviz and conda install pydotplus. In addition (in Windows), you will have to add the C:\Users\<user>\Anaconda3\envs\<env_name...