Book Image

Data Cleaning and Exploration with Machine Learning

By : Michael Walker
Book Image

Data Cleaning and Exploration with Machine Learning

By: Michael Walker

Overview of this book

Many individuals who know how to run machine learning algorithms do not have a good sense of the statistical assumptions they make and how to match the properties of the data to the algorithm for the best results. As you start with this book, models are carefully chosen to help you grasp the underlying data, including in-feature importance and correlation, and the distribution of features and targets. The first two parts of the book introduce you to techniques for preparing data for ML algorithms, without being bashful about using some ML techniques for data cleaning, including anomaly detection and feature selection. The book then helps you apply that knowledge to a wide variety of ML tasks. You’ll gain an understanding of popular supervised and unsupervised algorithms, how to prepare data for them, and how to evaluate them. Next, you’ll build models and understand the relationships in your data, as well as perform cleaning and exploration tasks with that data. You’ll make quick progress in studying the distribution of variables, identifying anomalies, and examining bivariate relationships, as you focus more on the accuracy of predictions in this book. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deal with complex data problems using unsupervised ML algorithms like principal component analysis and k-means clustering.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Cleaning and Machine Learning Algorithms
5
Section 2 – Preprocessing, Feature Selection, and Sampling
9
Section 3 – Modeling Continuous Targets with Supervised Learning
13
Section 4 – Modeling Dichotomous and Multiclass Targets with Supervised Learning
19
Section 5 – Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction with Unsupervised Learning

Chapter 13: Support Vector Machine Classification

There are some similarities between support vector classification models and k-nearest neighbors models. They are both intuitive and flexible. However, support vector classification, due to the nature of the algorithm, scales better than k-nearest neighbor. Unlike logistic regression, it can handle nonlinear models rather easily. The strategies and issues with using support vector machines for classification are similar to those we discussed in Chapter 8, Support Vector Regression, when we used support vector machines for regression.

One of the key advantages of support vector classification (SVC) is the ability it gives us to reduce model complexity without increasing our feature space. But it also provides multiple levers we can adjust to limit the possibility of overfitting. We can choose a linear model or select from several nonlinear kernels. We can use a regularization parameter, much as we did for logistic regression. With...