Book Image

Practical Data Science with Python

By : Nathan George
Book Image

Practical Data Science with Python

By: Nathan George

Overview of this book

Practical Data Science with Python teaches you core data science concepts, with real-world and realistic examples, and strengthens your grip on the basic as well as advanced principles of data preparation and storage, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and Python programming, helping you build a solid foundation to gain proficiency in data science. The book starts with an overview of basic Python skills and then introduces foundational data science techniques, followed by a thorough explanation of the Python code needed to execute the techniques. You'll understand the code by working through the examples. The code has been broken down into small chunks (a few lines or a function at a time) to enable thorough discussion. As you progress, you will learn how to perform data analysis while exploring the functionalities of key data science Python packages, including pandas, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Finally, the book covers ethics and privacy concerns in data science and suggests resources for improving data science skills, as well as ways to stay up to date on new data science developments. By the end of the book, you should be able to comfortably use Python for basic data science projects and should have the skills to execute the data science process on any data source.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
1
Part I - An Introduction and the Basics
4
Part II - Dealing with Data
10
Part III - Statistics for Data Science
13
Part IV - Machine Learning
21
Part V - Text Analysis and Reporting
24
Part VI - Wrapping Up
28
Other Books You May Enjoy
29
Index

Using AutoML with PyCaret

So far, we've looked at a few different ML models. However, there are many more, and it can be tedious to try many of them by hand. An easier way to try many models at once is with automated machine learning, or AutoML.

The no free lunch theorem

In ML, we usually don't know which model will perform best. Take our logistic regression models and Naïve Bayes, and the logistic regression models from Chapter 11, Machine Learning for Classification, on classification. We didn't have too many reasons to know which one might perform best before trying them. Of course, we know the Gaussian Naïve Bayes assumes features have a normal distribution, which seemed wrong, so we might guess that model may not work well. We can use assumptions for models to guess which models may or may not work, but beyond that, we should try several different models and compare the results, then choose the best-performing model based on the model evaluation...