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

Python implementation

Although scikit-learn does implement most ensemble methods that we cover in this book, stacking is not one of them. In this section, we will implement custom stacking solutions for both regression and classification problems.

Stacking for regression

Here, we will try to create a stacking ensemble for the diabetes regression dataset. The ensemble will consist of a 5-neighbor k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), a decision tree limited to a max depth of four, and a ridge regression (a regularized form of least squares regression). The meta-learner will be a simple Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) linear regression.

First, we have to import the required libraries and data. Scikit-learn provides a convenient method to...