Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Alvaro Fuentes
Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Alvaro Fuentes

Overview of this book

Predictive analytics is an applied field that employs a variety of quantitative methods using data to make predictions. It involves much more than just throwing data onto a computer to build a model. This book provides practical coverage to help you understand the most important concepts of predictive analytics. Using practical, step-by-step examples, we build predictive analytics solutions while using cutting-edge Python tools and packages. The book's step-by-step approach starts by defining the problem and moves on to identifying relevant data. We will also be performing data preparation, exploring and visualizing relationships, building models, tuning, evaluating, and deploying model. Each stage has relevant practical examples and efficient Python code. You will work with models such as KNN, Random Forests, and neural networks using the most important libraries in Python's data science stack: NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Keras, Dash, and so on. In addition to hands-on code examples, you will find intuitive explanations of the inner workings of the main techniques and algorithms used in predictive analytics. By the end of this book, you will be all set to build high-performance predictive analytics solutions using Python programming.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introduction to ML

Machine learning is a term that has seen an explosion in popularity, and that is mainly because it works. It has produced very good results when applied to many scientific and industrial problems, and is present, in one form or another, in many technological products and services people use daily. If you interact with the internet, use apps on your smartphone, check your email, or do any telecommunications or banking transactions, then you have definitely interacted with an ML model. This is not a book about ML; we will focus on giving the very basic concepts necessary to use ML as a tool for doing predictive analytics, we won't delve deeper into this exciting field, and there will be many important things that we will leave out. However, because of the huge rise in interest in the subject, there are many excellent resources covering everything from deeply...