Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with Python

By : Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur
Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with Python

By: Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur

Overview of this book

Machine learning—the ability of a machine to give right answers based on input data—has revolutionized the way we do business. Applied Supervised Learning with Python provides a rich understanding of how you can apply machine learning techniques in your data science projects using Python. You'll explore Jupyter Notebooks, the technology used commonly in academic and commercial circles with in-line code running support. With the help of fun examples, you'll gain experience working on the Python machine learning toolkit—from performing basic data cleaning and processing to working with a range of regression and classification algorithms. Once you’ve grasped the basics, you'll learn how to build and train your own models using advanced techniques such as decision trees, ensemble modeling, validation, and error metrics. You'll also learn data visualization techniques using powerful Python libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn. This book also covers ensemble modeling and random forest classifiers along with other methods for combining results from multiple models, and concludes by delving into cross-validation to test your algorithm and check how well the model works on unseen data. By the end of this book, you'll be equipped to not only work with machine learning algorithms, but also be able to create some of your own!
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Introduction


Say we have a problem statement that involves predicting whether a particular earthquake caused a tsunami or not. How do we decide what model to use? What do we know about the data we have? Nothing! But if we don't know and understand our data, chances are we'll end up building a model that's not very interpretable or reliable.

When it comes to data science, it's important to have a thorough understanding of the data we're dealing with, in order to generate features that are highly informative and, consequently, to build accurate and powerful models.

In order to gain this understanding, we perform an exploratory analysis on the data to see what the data can tell us about the relationships between the features and the target variable. Getting to know our data will even help us interpret the model we build and identify ways we can improve its accuracy.

The approach we take to achieve this is to allow the data to reveal its structure or model, which helps gain some new, often unsuspected...