Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Third Edition

By : Yuxi (Hayden) Liu
Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Third Edition

By: Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Overview of this book

Python Machine Learning By Example, Third Edition serves as a comprehensive gateway into the world of machine learning (ML). With six new chapters, on topics including movie recommendation engine development with Naïve Bayes, recognizing faces with support vector machine, predicting stock prices with artificial neural networks, categorizing images of clothing with convolutional neural networks, predicting with sequences using recurring neural networks, and leveraging reinforcement learning for making decisions, the book has been considerably updated for the latest enterprise requirements. At the same time, this book provides actionable insights on the key fundamentals of ML with Python programming. Hayden applies his expertise to demonstrate implementations of algorithms in Python, both from scratch and with libraries. Each chapter walks through an industry-adopted application. With the help of realistic examples, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics of ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, classification, regression, clustering, and NLP. By the end of this ML Python book, you will have gained a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed in the best practices of applying ML techniques to solve problems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Feature engineering on categorical variables with Spark

In this chapter, I have demonstrated how to build an ad click predictor that learns from massive click logs using Spark. Thus far, we have been using one-hot encoding to employ categorical inputs. In this section, we will talk about two popular feature engineering techniques: feature hashing and feature interaction.

Feature hashing is an alternative to one-hot encoding, while feature interaction is a variant of one-hot encoding. Feature engineering means generating new features based on domain knowledge or defined rules, in order to improve the learning performance achieved with the existing feature space.

Hashing categorical features

In machine learning, feature hashing (also called the hashing trick) is an efficient way to encode categorical features. It is based on hashing functions in computer science, which map data of variable sizes to data of a fixed (and usually smaller) size. It...