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)

Regressing with neural networks

We will again use our diamonds dataset. Although this is a small dataset and MLP is perhaps a model that is too complicated for this problem, there is no reason we could not use an MLP to solve it; in addition to this, remember that back when we defined the hypothetical problem, we established that the stakeholders wanted a model that was as accurate as possible in their predictions, so let's see how accurate we can get with an MLP. As always, let's import the libraries we will use:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import os
%matplotlib inline

Now, since we are beginning from scratch, load and prepare the dataset:

DATA_DIR = '../data'
FILE_NAME = 'diamonds.csv'
data_path = os.path.join(DATA_DIR, FILE_NAME)
diamonds = pd.read_csv(data_path)
## Preparation done from Chapter...