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

Getting started with two types of data – numerical and categorical

At first glance, the features in the preceding dataset are categorical, for example, male or female, one of four age groups, one of the predefined site categories, and whether or not the user is interested in sports. Such data is different from the numerical feature data we have worked with till now.

Categorical (also called qualitative) features represent characteristics, distinct groups, and a countable number of options. Categorical features may or may not have logical order. For example, household income from low, median, to high is an ordinal feature, while the category of an ad is not ordinal. Numerical (also called quantitative) features, on the other hand, have mathematical meaning as a measurement and, of course, are ordered. For instance, term frequency and the tf-idf variant are discrete and continuous...