Book Image

Data Science with Python

By : Rohan Chopra, Aaron England, Mohamed Noordeen Alaudeen
Book Image

Data Science with Python

By: Rohan Chopra, Aaron England, Mohamed Noordeen Alaudeen

Overview of this book

Data Science with Python begins by introducing you to data science and teaches you to install the packages you need to create a data science coding environment. You will learn three major techniques in machine learning: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. You will also explore basic classification and regression techniques, such as support vector machines, decision trees, and logistic regression. As you make your way through the book, you will understand the basic functions, data structures, and syntax of the Python language that are used to handle large datasets with ease. You will learn about NumPy and pandas libraries for matrix calculations and data manipulation, discover how to use Matplotlib to create highly customizable visualizations, and apply the boosting algorithm XGBoost to make predictions. In the concluding chapters, you will explore convolutional neural networks (CNNs), deep learning algorithms used to predict what is in an image. You will also understand how to feed human sentences to a neural network, make the model process contextual information, and create human language processing systems to predict the outcome. By the end of this book, you will be able to understand and implement any new data science algorithm and have the confidence to experiment with tools or libraries other than those covered in the book.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introduction

There are two main types of data, structured and unstructured. Structured data refers to data that has a defined format and is usually shaped as a table, such as data stored in an Excel sheet or a relational database. Unstructured data does not have a predefined schema. Anything that cannot be stored in a table falls under this category. Examples include voice files, images, and PDFs.

In this chapter, we will focus on structured data and creating machine learning models using XGBoost and Keras. The XGBoost algorithm is widely used by industry experts and researchers due to the speed at which it delivers high-precision models, and also due to its distributed nature. The distributed nature refers to the ability to process data and train models in parallel; this enables faster training and much shorter turnaround time for data scientists. Keras on the other hand lets us create neural network models. Neural networks work much better than boosting algorithms in some cases, but finding...