Book Image

Hands-On Ensemble Learning with Python

By : George Kyriakides, Konstantinos G. Margaritis
Book Image

Hands-On Ensemble Learning with Python

By: George Kyriakides, Konstantinos G. Margaritis

Overview of this book

Ensembling is a technique of combining two or more similar or dissimilar machine learning algorithms to create a model that delivers superior predictive power. This book will demonstrate how you can use a variety of weak algorithms to make a strong predictive model. With its hands-on approach, you'll not only get up to speed with the basic theory but also the application of different ensemble learning techniques. Using examples and real-world datasets, you'll be able to produce better machine learning models to solve supervised learning problems such as classification and regression. In addition to this, you'll go on to leverage ensemble learning techniques such as clustering to produce unsupervised machine learning models. As you progress, the chapters will cover different machine learning algorithms that are widely used in the practical world to make predictions and classifications. You'll even get to grips with the use of Python libraries such as scikit-learn and Keras for implementing different ensemble models. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed in ensemble learning, and have the skills you need to understand which ensemble method is required for which problem, and successfully implement them in real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction and Required Software Tools
4
Section 2: Non-Generative Methods
7
Section 3: Generative Methods
11
Section 4: Clustering
13
Section 5: Real World Applications

Demystifying recommendation systems

Although the inner workings of recommendation systems may seem intimidating at first, they are actually quite intuitive. Let's take an example of various movies and users. Each user has the option to rate a movie on a scale of 1 to 5. The recommendation system will try to find users with similar preferences to a new user, and will then recommend movies that the new user will probably like, as similar users also like them. Let's take the following simple example, consisting of four users and six movies:

User

Interstellar

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Matrix

Full Metal Jacket

Jarhead

Top Gun

U0

5

4

2

1

U1

1

4

4

3

U2

4

4

1

U3

4

5

5

4

Ratings for each movie from each user

As is evident, each user has rated a number of movies, although not all users watched the same...