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)

Summary

This was a dense chapter! We introduced some of the most important concepts of ML; we know that ML has three main branches, supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and that we will be using only supervised learning in this book. Supervised learning has two types of tasks, regression and classification, whose only difference is the type of target we want to predict. We also talked about the very abstract concepts of hypothesis set and learning algorithm, and we even invented our (very bad) pseudo-ML model.

We also talked about the very important concept of generalization, which is the whole point of building ML models: to be able to learn how to map the features to the target using the data we have, and then use this knowledge to make predictions with data that we don't have yet. Cross-validation is a set of techniques to evaluate models; the most basic...