Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

By : Andrich van Wyk
3 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

3 (1)
By: Andrich van Wyk

Overview of this book

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python is a comprehensive guide to learning the basics of machine learning and progressing to building scalable machine learning systems that are ready for release. This book will get you acquainted with the high-performance gradient-boosting LightGBM framework and show you how it can be used to solve various machine-learning problems to produce highly accurate, robust, and predictive solutions. Starting with simple machine learning models in scikit-learn, you’ll explore the intricacies of gradient boosting machines and LightGBM. You’ll be guided through various case studies to better understand the data science processes and learn how to practically apply your skills to real-world problems. As you progress, you’ll elevate your software engineering skills by learning how to build and integrate scalable machine-learning pipelines to process data, train models, and deploy them to serve secure APIs using Python tools such as FastAPI. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to use various -of-the-art tools that will help you build production-ready systems, including FLAML for AutoML, PostgresML for operating ML pipelines using Postgres, high-performance distributed training and serving via Dask, and creating and running models in the Cloud with AWS Sagemaker.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Gradient Boosting and LightGBM Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Practical Machine Learning with LightGBM
10
Part 3: Production-ready Machine Learning with LightGBM

Introducing Machine Learning

Our journey starts with an introduction to machine learning and the fundamental concepts we’ll use throughout this book.

We’ll start by providing an overview of machine learning from a software engineering perspective. Then, we’ll introduce the core concepts that are used in the field of machine learning and data science: models, datasets, learning paradigms, and other details. This introduction will include a practical example that clearly illustrates the machine learning terms discussed.

We will also introduce decision trees, a crucially important machine learning algorithm that is our first step to understanding LightGBM.

After completing this chapter, you will have established a solid foundation in machine learning and the practical application of machine learning techniques.

The following main topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • What is machine learning?
  • Introducing models, datasets, and supervised learning
  • Decision tree learning