Book Image

Data Science Algorithms in a Week - Second Edition

By : David Natingga
Book Image

Data Science Algorithms in a Week - Second Edition

By: David Natingga

Overview of this book

Machine learning applications are highly automated and self-modifying, and continue to improve over time with minimal human intervention, as they learn from the trained data. To address the complex nature of various real-world data problems, specialized machine learning algorithms have been developed. Through algorithmic and statistical analysis, these models can be leveraged to gain new knowledge from existing data as well. Data Science Algorithms in a Week addresses all problems related to accurate and efficient data classification and prediction. Over the course of seven days, you will be introduced to seven algorithms, along with exercises that will help you understand different aspects of machine learning. You will see how to pre-cluster your data to optimize and classify it for large datasets. This book also guides you in predicting data based on existing trends in your dataset. This book covers algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, Naive Bayes, decision trees, random forest, k-means, regression, and time-series analysis. By the end of this book, you will understand how to choose machine learning algorithms for clustering, classification, and regression and know which is best suited for your problem
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Glossary of Algorithms and Methods in Data Science
Index

Gender classification – Bayes for continuous random variables


So far, we have been given a probability event that belonged to one of a finite number of classes, for example, a temperature was classified as cold, warm, or hot. But how would we calculate the posterior probability if we were given the temperature in °C instead?

For this example, we are given the heights of five men and five women, as shown in the following table:

Height in cm

Gender

180

Male

174

Male

184

Male

168

Male

178

Male

170

Female

164

Female

155

Female

162

Female

166

Female

172

?

 

Suppose that the next person has a height of 172 cm. What gender is that person more likely to be, and with what probability?

Analysis

One approach to solving this problem could be to assign classes to the numerical values; for example, the people with a height of between 170 cm and 179 cm would be in the same class. With this approach, we may end up with a few classes that are very wide, for example, with a high cm range, or with classes that are more precise but have...