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

SVR with a linear model

We often have enough domain knowledge to take an approach that is more nuanced than simply minimizing prediction errors in our training data. Using this knowledge may allow us to accept more bias in our model, when small amounts of bias do not matter much substantively, to reduce variance. With SVR, we can adjust hyperparameters such as epsilon (the acceptable error range) and C (which adjusts the tolerance for errors outside of that range) to improve our model’s performance.

If a linear model can perform well on your data, linear SVR might be a good choice. We can build a linear SVR model with scikit-learn’s LinearSVR class. Let’s try creating a linear SVR model with the gasoline tax data that we used in the previous chapter:

  1. We need many of the same libraries that we used in the previous chapter to create the training and testing DataFrames and to preprocess the data. We also need to import the LinearSVR and uniform modules...