Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Machine learning has gained tremendous popularity for its powerful and fast predictions with large datasets. However, the true forces behind its powerful output are the complex algorithms involving substantial statistical analysis that churn large datasets and generate substantial insight. This second edition of Machine Learning Algorithms walks you through prominent development outcomes that have taken place relating to machine learning algorithms, which constitute major contributions to the machine learning process and help you to strengthen and master statistical interpretation across the areas of supervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. Once the core concepts of an algorithm have been covered, you’ll explore real-world examples based on the most diffused libraries, such as scikit-learn, NLTK, TensorFlow, and Keras. You will discover new topics such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), Bayesian regression, discriminant analysis, advanced clustering, and gaussian mixture. By the end of this book, you will have studied machine learning algorithms and be able to put them into production to make your machine learning applications more innovative.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Feature selection and filtering

An unnormalized dataset with many features contains information proportional to the independence of all features and their variance. Let's consider a small dataset with three features, generated with random Gaussian distributions:

Sample dataset containing three Gaussian features with different standard deviations

Even without further analysis, it's obvious that the central line (with the lowest variance) is almost constant and doesn't provide any useful information. Recall from Chapter 2, Important Elements in Machine Learning, that the entropy H(X) is quite small, while the other two variables carry more information. A variance threshold is, therefore, a useful approach to remove all those elements whose contribution (in terms of variability and so, information) is under a predefined level. The scikit-learn library provides the...