Book Image

The Data Science Workshop - Second Edition

By : Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare
5 (1)
Book Image

The Data Science Workshop - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare

Overview of this book

Where there’s data, there’s insight. With so much data being generated, there is immense scope to extract meaningful information that’ll boost business productivity and profitability. By learning to convert raw data into game-changing insights, you’ll open new career paths and opportunities. The Data Science Workshop begins by introducing different types of projects and showing you how to incorporate machine learning algorithms in them. You’ll learn to select a relevant metric and even assess the performance of your model. To tune the hyperparameters of an algorithm and improve its accuracy, you’ll get hands-on with approaches such as grid search and random search. Next, you’ll learn dimensionality reduction techniques to easily handle many variables at once, before exploring how to use model ensembling techniques and create new features to enhance model performance. In a bid to help you automatically create new features that improve your model, the book demonstrates how to use the automated feature engineering tool. You’ll also understand how to use the orchestration and scheduling workflow to deploy machine learning models in batch. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
12
12. Feature Engineering

Simple Methods for Ensemble Learning

As defined earlier in the chapter, ensemble learning is all about combining the strengths of individual models to get a superior model. In this section, we will explore some simple techniques such as the following:

  • Averaging
  • Weighted averaging
  • Max voting

Let's take a look at each of them in turn.

Averaging

Averaging is a naïve way of doing ensemble learning; however, it is extremely useful too. The basic idea behind this technique is to take the predictions of multiple individual models and then average the predictions to generate a final prediction. The assumption is that by averaging the predictions of different individual learners, we eliminate the errors made by individual learners, thereby generating a model superior to the base model. One prerequisite to make averaging work is to have the predictions of the base models be uncorrelated. This would mean that the individual models should not make the same...