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

Summary


In this chapter, we introduced KNN, a simple but powerful model that can be used in classification and regression tasks. KNN is a lazy learner and a non-parametric model; it does not estimate the values of a fixed number of parameters from the training data. Instead, it stores all the training instances and uses the instances that are nearest the test instance to predict the value of the response variable. We worked through toy classification and regression problems. We also introduced scikit-learn's transformer interface; we used LabelBinarizer to transform string labels to binary labels and StandardScaler to standardize our features.

In the next chapter, we will discuss feature extraction techniques for categorical variables, text, and images; these will allow us to apply KNN to more problems in the real world.