Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Trent Hauck
Book Image

scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Trent Hauck

Overview of this book

Python is quickly becoming the go-to language for analysts and data scientists due to its simplicity and flexibility, and within the Python data space, scikit-learn is the unequivocal choice for machine learning. This book includes walk throughs and solutions to the common as well as the not-so-common problems in machine learning, and how scikit-learn can be leveraged to perform various machine learning tasks effectively. The second edition begins with taking you through recipes on evaluating the statistical properties of data and generates synthetic data for machine learning modelling. As you progress through the chapters, you will comes across recipes that will teach you to implement techniques like data pre-processing, linear regression, logistic regression, K-NN, Naïve Bayes, classification, decision trees, Ensembles and much more. Furthermore, you’ll learn to optimize your models with multi-class classification, cross validation, model evaluation and dive deeper in to implementing deep learning with scikit-learn. Along with covering the enhanced features on model section, API and new features like classifiers, regressors and estimators the book also contains recipes on evaluating and fine-tuning the performance of your model. By the end of this book, you will have explored plethora of features offered by scikit-learn for Python to solve any machine learning problem you come across.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction

In this chapter, we'll learn how to make predictions with scikit-learn. Machine learning emphasizes on measuring the ability to predict, and with scikit-learn we will predict accurately and quickly.

We will examine the iris dataset, which consists of measurements of three types of Iris flowers: Iris Setosa, Iris Versicolor, and Iris Virginica.

To measure the strength of the predictions, we will:

  • Save some data for testing
  • Build a model using only training data
  • Measure the predictive power on the test set

The prediction—one of three flower types is categorical. This type of problem is called a classification problem.

Informally, classification asks, Is it an apple or an orange? Contrast this with machine learning regression, which asks, How many apples? By the way, the answer can be 4.5 apples for regression.

By the evolution of its design, scikit-learn addresses machine learning mainly via four categories:

  • Classification:
    • Non-text classification, like the Iris flowers example
    • Text classification
  • Regression
  • Clustering
  • Dimensionality reduction