Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example

By : Yuxi (Hayden) Liu
Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example

By: Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Overview of this book

Data science and machine learning are some of the top buzzwords in the technical world today. A resurging interest in machine learning is due to the same factors that have made data mining and Bayesian analysis more popular than ever. This book is your entry point to machine learning. This book starts with an introduction to machine learning and the Python language and shows you how to complete the setup. Moving ahead, you will learn all the important concepts such as, exploratory data analysis, data preprocessing, feature extraction, data visualization and clustering, classification, regression and model performance evaluation. With the help of various projects included, you will find it intriguing to acquire the mechanics of several important machine learning algorithms – they are no more obscure as they thought. Also, you will be guided step by step to build your own models from scratch. Toward the end, you will gather a broad picture of the machine learning ecosystem and best practices of applying machine learning techniques. Through this book, you will learn to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with the powerful yet simple language, Python. Interesting and easy-to-follow examples, to name some, news topic classification, spam email detection, online ad click-through prediction, stock prices forecast, will keep you glued till you reach your goal.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Python and Machine Learning, is the starting point for someone who is looking forward to enter the field of ML with Python. You will get familiar with the basics of Python and ML in this chapter and set up the software on your machine.

Chapter 2, Exploring the 20 Newsgroups Dataset with Text Analysis Algorithms, explains important concepts such as getting the data, its features, and pre-processing. It also covers the dimension reduction technique, principal component analysis, and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm.

Chapter 3, Spam Email Detection with Naive Bayes, covers classification, naive Bayes, and its in-depth implementation, classification performance evaluation, model selection and tuning, and cross-validation. Examples such as spam e-mail detection are demonstrated.

Chapter 4, News Topic Classification with Support Vector Machine, covers multiclass classification, Support Vector Machine, and how it is applied in topic classification. Other important concepts, such as kernel machine, overfitting, and regularization, are discussed as well.

Chapter 5, Click-Through Prediction with Tree-Based Algorithms, explains decision trees and random forests in depth over the course of solving an advertising click-through rate problem.

Chapter 6, Click-Through Prediction with Logistic Regression, explains in depth the logistic regression classifier. Also, concepts such as categorical variable encoding, L1 and L2 regularization, feature selection, online learning, and stochastic gradient descent are detailed.

Chapter 7, Stock Price Prediction with Regression Algorithms, analyzes predicting stock market prices using Yahoo/Google Finance data and maybe additional data. Also, it covers the challenges in finance and brief explanations of related concepts.

Chapter 8, Best Practices, aims to foolproof your learning and get you ready for production.

After covering multiple projects in this book, the readers will have gathered a broad picture of the ML ecosystem using Python.