Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Overview of this book

In this book, you will learn all the important machine learning algorithms that are commonly used in the field of data science. These algorithms can be used for supervised as well as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and semi-supervised learning. The algorithms that are covered in this book are linear regression, logistic regression, SVM, naïve Bayes, k-means, random forest, TensorFlow and feature engineering. In this book, you will how to use these algorithms to resolve your problems, and how they work. This book will also introduce you to natural language processing and recommendation systems, which help you to run multiple algorithms simultaneously. On completion of the book, you will know how to pick the right machine learning algorithm for clustering, classification, or regression for your problem
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Feature selection and filtering


An unnormalized dataset with many features contains information proportional to the independence of all features and their variance. Let's consider a small dataset with three features, generated with random Gaussian distributions:

Even without further analysis, it's obvious that the central line (with the lowest variance) is almost constant and doesn't provide any useful information. If you remember the previous chapter, the entropy H(X) is quite small, while the other two variables carry more information. A variance threshold is, therefore, a useful approach to remove all those elements whose contribution (in terms of variability and so, information) is under a predefined level. scikit-learn provides the class VarianceThreshold that can easily solve this problem. By applying it on the previous dataset, we get the following result:

from sklearn.feature_selection import VarianceThreshold

>>> X[0:3, :]
array([[-3.5077778 , -3.45267063,  0.9681903 ],...