Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Second Edition

By : Yuxi (Hayden) Liu
Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Second Edition

By: Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Overview of this book

The surge in interest in machine learning (ML) is due to the fact that it revolutionizes automation by learning patterns in data and using them to make predictions and decisions. If you’re interested in ML, this book will serve as your entry point to ML. Python Machine Learning By Example begins with an introduction to important ML concepts and implementations using Python libraries. Each chapter of the book walks you through an industry adopted application. You’ll implement ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and natural language processing (NLP) in a clear and easy-to-follow way. With the help of this extended and updated edition, you’ll understand how to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with the powerful yet simple Python language and popular Python packages and tools such as TensorFlow, scikit-learn, gensim, and Keras. To aid your understanding of popular ML algorithms, the book covers interesting and easy-to-follow examples such as news topic modeling and classification, spam email detection, stock price forecasting, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll have put together a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed with the best practices of applying ML techniques to make the most out of new opportunities.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamentals of Machine Learning
3
Section 2: Practical Python Machine Learning By Example
12
Section 3: Python Machine Learning Best Practices

Predicting Online Ad Click-Through with Tree-Based Algorithms

In this chapter and the next, we will be solving one of the most data-driven problems in digital advertising: ad click-through prediction - given a user and the page he/she is visiting, this predicts how likely it is that they will click on a given ad. We will be focusing on learning tree-based algorithms (decision tree and random forest) and utilizing them to tackle this billion-dollar problem. We will be exploring decision trees from the root to the leaves, as well as the aggregated version, a forest of trees. This won't be a bland chapter, as there are a lot of hand-calculations and implementations of tree models from scratch, and using scikit-learn and TensorFlow.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introduction to online advertising click-through
  • Two types of feature: numerical and categorical...