Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Machine learning has gained tremendous popularity for its powerful and fast predictions with large datasets. However, the true forces behind its powerful output are the complex algorithms involving substantial statistical analysis that churn large datasets and generate substantial insight. This second edition of Machine Learning Algorithms walks you through prominent development outcomes that have taken place relating to machine learning algorithms, which constitute major contributions to the machine learning process and help you to strengthen and master statistical interpretation across the areas of supervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. Once the core concepts of an algorithm have been covered, you’ll explore real-world examples based on the most diffused libraries, such as scikit-learn, NLTK, TensorFlow, and Keras. You will discover new topics such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), Bayesian regression, discriminant analysis, advanced clustering, and gaussian mixture. By the end of this book, you will have studied machine learning algorithms and be able to put them into production to make your machine learning applications more innovative.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the fundamental clustering algorithms, starting with k-NN, which is an instance-based method that can be employed whenever it's helpful to retrieve the most similar samples given a query point. Then, we discussed the Gaussian mixture approach, focusing on its peculiarities and requirements, discussing how it's possible to use it whenever a soft-clustering is preferable than a hard method.

The natural evolution of Gaussian mixture with null covariances leads to the K-means algorithm, which is based on the idea of defining (randomly, or according to some criteria) k centroids that represent the clusters and optimize their position so that the sum of squared distances for every point in each cluster and the centroid is minimal. We have discussed different methods to find out the optimal number of clusters and, consequently, to evaluate...