Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The discovery of information through data clustering and classification is becoming a key differentiator for competitive organizations. Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, engineering design, logistics, manufacturing, and trading strategies, to detection of genetic anomalies. The book is your one stop guide that introduces you to the functional capabilities of the Scala programming language that are critical to the creation of machine learning algorithms such as dependency injection and implicits. You start by learning data preprocessing and filtering techniques. Following this, you'll move on to unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and dimension reduction, followed by probabilistic graphical models such as Naïve Bayes, hidden Markov models and Monte Carlo inference. Further, it covers the discriminative algorithms such as linear, logistic regression with regularization, kernelization, support vector machines, neural networks, and deep learning. You’ll move on to evolutionary computing, multibandit algorithms, and reinforcement learning. Finally, the book includes a comprehensive overview of parallel computing in Scala and Akka followed by a description of Apache Spark and its ML library. With updated codes based on the latest version of Scala and comprehensive examples, this book will ensure that you have more than just a solid fundamental knowledge in machine learning with Scala.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Scala for Machine Learning Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 13. Evolutionary Computing

There's a lot more to evolutionary computing than genetic algorithms. The first foray into evolutionary computing was motivated by the need to address different types of large combinatorial problems also known as NP problems. This field of research was pioneered by John Holland [10:1] and David Goldberg [10:2] to leverage the theory of evolution and biology to solve combinatorial problems. Their findings should be of interest to anyone eager to learn about the foundation of genetic algorithms (GA) and artificial life.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • The origin of evolutionary computing

  • The purpose and foundation of genetic algorithms as well as their benefits and limitations

From a practical perspective, you will learn how to:

  • Apply genetic algorithms to leverage a technical analysis of market price and volume movement to predict future returns

  • Evaluate or estimate the search space

  • Encode solutions in the binary format using either hierarchical or flat...