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)

Practical considerations before modeling

We now have a basic understanding of some of the most important conceptual and theoretical aspects of ML. In this section, we will talk about some of the practical things we need to do before building a model; this includes some further data processing that is needed for feeding the data for model training. We will also introduce our main tool for model building: scikit-learn.

Introducing scikit-learn

If you go to the main web page of scikit-learn, the first things you will read are the following statements about it:

  • Simple and efficient tool for data mining and data analysis
  • Accessible to everybody, and reusable in various contexts
  • Built on NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib
  • Open source...