Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials

Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials

Overview of this book

The book starts by introducing you to setting up your essential data science toolbox. Then it will guide you across all the data munging and preprocessing phases. This will be done in a manner that explains all the core data science activities related to loading data, transforming and fixing it for analysis, as well as exploring and processing it. Finally, it will complete the overview by presenting you with the main machine learning algorithms, the graph analysis technicalities, and all the visualization instruments that can make your life easier in presenting your results. In this walkthrough, structured as a data science project, you will always be accompanied by clear code and simplified examples to help you understand the underlying mechanics and real-world datasets.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Advanced nonlinear algorithms


Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a powerful and advanced supervised learning technique for classification and regression that can automatically fit linear and nonlinear models. Scikit-learn offers an implementation based on LIBSVM, a complete library of SVM classification and regression implementations, and LIBLINEAR, a library more scalable for linear classification of large datasets, especially the sparse text based ones. Both libraries have been developed at the National Taiwan University, and both have been written in C++ with a C API to interface with other languages. Both libraries have been extensively tested (being free, they have been used in other open source machine learning toolkits) and have been proven to be both fast and reliable. The C API explains well two tricky needs for them to operate better under the Python Scikit-learn:

  • LIBSVM, when operating, needs to reserve some memory for kernel operations. The cache_size parameter is used to set the...