Book Image

Python Machine Learning

By : Sebastian Raschka
Book Image

Python Machine Learning

By: Sebastian Raschka

Overview of this book

Machine learning and predictive analytics are transforming the way businesses and other organizations operate. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success, becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. Python can help you deliver key insights into your data – its unique capabilities as a language let you build sophisticated algorithms and statistical models that can reveal new perspectives and answer key questions that are vital for success. Python Machine Learning gives you access to the world of predictive analytics and demonstrates why Python is one of the world’s leading data science languages. If you want to ask better questions of data, or need to improve and extend the capabilities of your machine learning systems, this practical data science book is invaluable. Covering a wide range of powerful Python libraries, including scikit-learn, Theano, and Keras, and featuring guidance and tips on everything from sentiment analysis to neural networks, you’ll soon be able to answer some of the most important questions facing you and your organization.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Python Machine Learning
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis

Throughout the previous chapters, you learned a lot about the main concepts behind supervised learning and trained many different models for classification tasks to predict group memberships or categorical variables. In this chapter, we will take a dive into another subcategory of supervised learning: regression analysis.

Regression models are used to predict target variables on a continuous scale, which makes them attractive for addressing many questions in science as well as applications in industry, such as understanding relationships between variables, evaluating trends, or making forecasts. One example would be predicting the sales of a company in future months.

In this chapter, we will discuss the main concepts of regression models and cover the following topics:

  • Exploring and visualizing datasets

  • Looking at different approaches to implement linear regression models

  • Training regression models that are robust to...