Book Image

Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn

By : Sebastian Raschka, Yuxi (Hayden) Liu, Vahid Mirjalili
5 (7)
Book Image

Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn

5 (7)
By: Sebastian Raschka, Yuxi (Hayden) Liu, Vahid Mirjalili

Overview of this book

Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn is a comprehensive guide to machine learning and deep learning with PyTorch. It acts as both a step-by-step tutorial and a reference you'll keep coming back to as you build your machine learning systems. Packed with clear explanations, visualizations, and examples, the book covers all the essential machine learning techniques in depth. While some books teach you only to follow instructions, with this machine learning book, we teach the principles allowing you to build models and applications for yourself. Why PyTorch? PyTorch is the Pythonic way to learn machine learning, making it easier to learn and simpler to code with. This book explains the essential parts of PyTorch and how to create models using popular libraries, such as PyTorch Lightning and PyTorch Geometric. You will also learn about generative adversarial networks (GANs) for generating new data and training intelligent agents with reinforcement learning. Finally, this new edition is expanded to cover the latest trends in deep learning, including graph neural networks and large-scale transformers used for natural language processing (NLP). This PyTorch book is your companion to machine learning with Python, whether you're a Python developer new to machine learning or want to deepen your knowledge of the latest developments.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
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Index

Handling categorical data

So far, we have only been working with numerical values. However, it is not uncommon for real-world datasets to contain one or more categorical feature columns. In this section, we will make use of simple yet effective examples to see how to deal with this type of data in numerical computing libraries.

When we are talking about categorical data, we have to further distinguish between ordinal and nominal features. Ordinal features can be understood as categorical values that can be sorted or ordered. For example, t-shirt size would be an ordinal feature, because we can define an order: XL > L > M. In contrast, nominal features don’t imply any order; to continue with the previous example, we could think of t-shirt color as a nominal feature since it typically doesn’t make sense to say that, for example, red is larger than blue.

Categorical data encoding with pandas

Before we explore different techniques for...