Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By : Gavin Hackeling
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn - Second Edition

By: Gavin Hackeling

Overview of this book

Machine learning is the buzzword bringing computer science and statistics together to build smart and efficient models. Using powerful algorithms and techniques offered by machine learning you can automate any analytical model. This book examines a variety of machine learning models including popular machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, naive Bayes, k-means, decision trees, and artificial neural networks. It discusses data preprocessing, hyperparameter optimization, and ensemble methods. You will build systems that classify documents, recognize images, detect ads, and more. You will learn to use scikit-learn’s API to extract features from categorical variables, text and images; evaluate model performance, and develop an intuition for how to improve your model’s performance. By the end of this book, you will master all required concepts of scikit-learn to build efficient models at work to carry out advanced tasks with the practical approach.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
From Decision Trees to Random Forests and Other Ensemble Methods
Index

Visualizing high-dimensional data with PCA


It is easy to discover patterns by visualizing data with two or three dimensions. A high-dimensional dataset cannot be represented graphically, but we can still gain some insights into its structure by reducing it to two or three principal components. Collected in 1936, Fisher's Iris dataset is a collection of fifty samples from each of three species of Iris: Iris setosa, Iris virginica, and Iris versicolor. The explanatory variables are measurements of the length and width of the petals and sepals of the flowers. The Iris dataset is commonly used to test classification models, and is included with scikit-learn. Let's reduce the iris dataset's four dimensions so that we can visualize it in two dimensions. First we load the built-in iris dataset and instantiate a PCA estimator. The PCA class takes the number of principal components to retain as a hyperparameter. Like the other estimators, PCA exposes a fit_transform method that returns the reduced...