Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By : Stephen Klosterman
Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By: Stephen Klosterman

Overview of this book

Data Science Projects with Python is designed to give you practical guidance on industry-standard data analysis and machine learning tools, by applying them to realistic data problems. You will learn how to use pandas and Matplotlib to critically examine datasets with summary statistics and graphs, and extract the insights you seek to derive. You will build your knowledge as you prepare data using the scikit-learn package and feed it to machine learning algorithms such as regularized logistic regression and random forest. You’ll discover how to tune algorithms to provide the most accurate predictions on new and unseen data. As you progress, you’ll gain insights into the working and output of these algorithms, building your understanding of both the predictive capabilities of the models and why they make these predictions. By then end of this book, you will have the necessary skills to confidently use machine learning algorithms to perform detailed data analysis and extract meaningful insights from unstructured data.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Data Science Projects with Python
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned how to explore features one at a time, using univariate feature selection methods including Pearson correlation and an ANOVA F-test. While looking at features in this way does not always tell the whole story, since you are potentially missing out on important interactions between features, it is a necessary step. Understanding the relationships between the most predictive features and the response variable, and creating effective visualizations around them, is a great way to communicate your findings to your client. We used customized plots, such as overlapping histograms created with Matplotlib, to create visualizations of the most important features.

Then we began an in-depth description of how logistic regression works, exploring such topics as the sigmoid function, log odds, and the linear decision boundary. While logistic regression is one of the simplest classification models, and often is not as powerful as other methods, it is one of the most...