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)

XGBoost Library

The library we used to perform the above classification is named XGBoost. The library enables a lot of customization using the many parameters it has. In the following sections, we will dive in and understand the different parameters and functions of the XGBoost library.

Note

For more information about XGBoost, refer the website: https://xgboost.readthedocs.io

Training

Parameters that affect the training of any XGBoost model are listed below.

  • booster: Even though we mentioned in the introduction that the base learner of XGBoost is a regression tree, using this library, we can use linear regression as the weak learner as well. Another weak learner, DART booster, is a new method to tree boosting, which drops trees at random to prevent overfitting. To use tree boosting, pass "gbtree" (default); for linear regression, pass "gblinear"; and for tree boosting with dropout, pass "dart".

    Note

    You may learn more about DART from this paper: http://www.jmlr...