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

Chapter 7. Regression – Recommendations

You have probably learned about regression already in high school mathematics class, this was probably called ordinary least squares (OLS) regression then. This centuries old technique is fast to run and can be effectively used for many real-world problems. In this chapter, we will start by reviewing OLS regression and showing you how it is available in both NumPy and scikit-learn.

In various modern problems, we run into limitations of the classical methods and start to benefit from more advanced methods, which we will see later in this chapter. This is particularly true when we have many features, including when we have more features than examples (which is something that ordinary least squares cannot handle correctly). These techniques are much more modern, with major developments happening in the last decade. They go by names such as lasso, ridge, or elastic nets. We will go into these in detail.

Finally, we will start looking at recommendations....