Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Book Image

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Overview of this book

Machine learning, the field of building systems that learn from data, is exploding on the Web and elsewhere. Python is a wonderful language in which to develop machine learning applications. As a dynamic language, it allows for fast exploration and experimentation and an increasing number of machine learning libraries are developed for Python.Building Machine Learning system with Python shows you exactly how to find patterns through raw data. The book starts by brushing up on your Python ML knowledge and introducing libraries, and then moves on to more serious projects on datasets, Modelling, Recommendations, improving recommendations through examples and sailing through sound and image processing in detail. Using open-source tools and libraries, readers will learn how to apply methods to text, images, and sounds. You will also learn how to evaluate, compare, and choose machine learning techniques. Written for Python programmers, Building Machine Learning Systems with Python teaches you how to use open-source libraries to solve real problems with machine learning. The book is based on real-world examples that the user can build on. Readers will learn how to write programs that classify the quality of StackOverflow answers or whether a music file is Jazz or Metal. They will learn regression, which is demonstrated on how to recommend movies to users. Advanced topics such as topic modeling (finding a text's most important topics), basket analysis, and cloud computing are covered as well as many other interesting aspects.Building Machine Learning Systems with Python will give you the tools and understanding required to build your own systems, which are tailored to solve your problems.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Building Machine Learning Systems with Python
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing the Naive Bayes classifier


Naive Bayes is probably one of the most elegant machine learning algorithms out there that is of practical use. Despite its name, it is not that naive when you look at its classification performance. It proves to be quite robust to irrelevant features, which it kindly ignores. It learns fast and predicts equally so. It does not require lots of storage. So, why is it then called naive?

The naive was added to the account for one assumption that is required for Bayes to work optimally: all features must be independent of each other. This, however, is rarely the case for real-world applications. Nevertheless, it still returns very good accuracy in practice even when the independent assumption does not hold.

Getting to know the Bayes theorem

At its core, Naive Bayes classification is nothing more than keeping track of which feature gives evidence to which class. To ease our understanding, let us assume the following meanings for the variables that we will use...