Book Image

Practical Automated Machine Learning Using H2O.ai

By : Salil Ajgaonkar
Book Image

Practical Automated Machine Learning Using H2O.ai

By: Salil Ajgaonkar

Overview of this book

With the huge amount of data being generated over the internet and the benefits that Machine Learning (ML) predictions bring to businesses, ML implementation has become a low-hanging fruit that everyone is striving for. The complex mathematics behind it, however, can be discouraging for a lot of users. This is where H2O comes in – it automates various repetitive steps, and this encapsulation helps developers focus on results rather than handling complexities. You’ll begin by understanding how H2O’s AutoML simplifies the implementation of ML by providing a simple, easy-to-use interface to train and use ML models. Next, you’ll see how AutoML automates the entire process of training multiple models, optimizing their hyperparameters, as well as explaining their performance. As you advance, you’ll find out how to leverage a Plain Old Java Object (POJO) and Model Object, Optimized (MOJO) to deploy your models to production. Throughout this book, you’ll take a hands-on approach to implementation using H2O that’ll enable you to set up your ML systems in no time. By the end of this H2O book, you’ll be able to train and use your ML models using H2O AutoML, right from experimentation all the way to production without a single need to understand complex statistics or data science.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1 H2O AutoML Basics
4
Part 2 H2O AutoML Deep Dive
10
Part 3 H2O AutoML Advanced Implementation and Productization

Encoding data using target encoding

As we know, machines are only capable of understanding numbers. However, plenty of real-world ML problems revolve around objects and information that are not necessarily numerical in nature. Things such as states, names, and classes, in general, are represented as categories rather than numbers. This kind of data is called categorical data. Categorical data will often play a big part in analysis and prediction. Hence, there is a need to convert these categorical values to a numerical format so that machines can understand them. The conversion should also be in such a way that we do not lose the inherent meaning of those categories, nor do we introduce new information into the data, such as the incremental nature of numbers, for example.

This is where encoding is used. Encoding is a process where categorical values are transformed, in other words, encoded, into numerical values. There are plenty of encoding methods that can perform this transformation...