Book Image

Mastering .NET Machine Learning

By : Jamie Dixon, Damian R Mingle
Book Image

Mastering .NET Machine Learning

By: Jamie Dixon, Damian R Mingle

Overview of this book

.Net is one of the widely used platforms for developing applications. With the meteoric rise of Machine learning, developers are now keen on finding out how can they make their .Net applications smarter. Also, .NET developers are interested into moving into the world of devices and how to apply machine learning techniques to, well, machines. This book is packed with real-world examples to easily use machine learning techniques in your business applications. You will begin with introduction to F# and prepare yourselves for machine learning using .NET framework. You will be writing a simple linear regression model using an example which predicts sales of a product. Forming a base with the regression model, you will start using machine learning libraries available in .NET framework such as Math.NET, Numl.NET and Accord.NET with the help of a sample application. You will then move on to writing multiple linear regressions and logistic regressions. You will learn what is open data and the awesomeness of type providers. Next, you are going to address some of the issues that we have been glossing over so far and take a deep dive into obtaining, cleaning, and organizing our data. You will compare the utility of building a KNN and Naive Bayes model to achieve best possible results. Implementation of Kmeans and PCA using Accord.NET and Numl.NET libraries is covered with the help of an example application. We will then look at many of issues confronting creating real-world machine learning models like overfitting and how to combat them using confusion matrixes, scaling, normalization, and feature selection. You will now enter into the world of Neural Networks and move your line of business application to a hybrid scientific application. After you have covered all the above machine learning models, you will see how to deal with very large datasets using MBrace and how to deploy machine learning models to Internet of Thing (IoT) devices so that the machine can learn and adapt on the fly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering .NET Machine Learning
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN)


k-NN stands for k-Nearest Neighbors and is one of the most basic classification models available. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let's take a look at k-NN from a graphical perspective. Consider a group of students who spent some amount of time studying and also drinking beers the night before the exam. On a graph, it looks like this:

If I added a seventh student to the graph like this, would you think that the student passed or failed the exam?

You would likely say they are a star—they passed the exam. If I asked you why, you would probably say that are more like the other stars. This kind of mental processing is very much how our minds work—if everyone in your neighborhood buys a Japanese car and thinks it has high quality, you are more likely to buy one too if you are looking for a high quality car. In fact, much of marketing is based on the k-NN theory.

Unlike the brain, which makes associations effortlessly, k-NN actually uses some math to classify...