Book Image

The Supervised Learning Workshop - Second Edition

By : Blaine Bateman, Ashish Ranjan Jha, Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur
Book Image

The Supervised Learning Workshop - Second Edition

By: Blaine Bateman, Ashish Ranjan Jha, Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur

Overview of this book

Would you like to understand how and why machine learning techniques and data analytics are spearheading enterprises globally? From analyzing bioinformatics to predicting climate change, machine learning plays an increasingly pivotal role in our society. Although the real-world applications may seem complex, this book simplifies supervised learning for beginners with a step-by-step interactive approach. Working with real-time datasets, you’ll learn how supervised learning, when used with Python, can produce efficient predictive models. Starting with the fundamentals of supervised learning, you’ll quickly move to understand how to automate manual tasks and the process of assessing date using Jupyter and Python libraries like pandas. Next, you’ll use data exploration and visualization techniques to develop powerful supervised learning models, before understanding how to distinguish variables and represent their relationships using scatter plots, heatmaps, and box plots. After using regression and classification models on real-time datasets to predict future outcomes, you’ll grasp advanced ensemble techniques such as boosting and random forests. Finally, you’ll learn the importance of model evaluation in supervised learning and study metrics to evaluate regression and classification tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills you need to work on your real-life supervised learning Python projects.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Summary

This chapter discussed why model evaluation is important in supervised machine learning and looked at several important metrics that are used to evaluate regression and classification tasks. We saw that while regression models were fairly straightforward to evaluate, the performance of classification models could be measured in a number of ways, depending on what we want the model to prioritize. Besides numerical metrics, we also looked at how to plot precision-recall and ROC curves to better interpret and evaluate model performance. After this, we talked about why evaluating a model by calculating the prediction error in relation to the data that the model was trained on was a bad idea, and how testing a model on data that it has already seen would lead to the model having a high variance. With this, we introduced the concept of having a hold-out dataset and demonstrated why k-fold cross-validation is a useful strategy to have, along with sampling techniques that ensure that...