Book Image

Training Systems using Python Statistical Modeling

By : Curtis Miller
Book Image

Training Systems using Python Statistical Modeling

By: Curtis Miller

Overview of this book

Python's ease-of-use and multi-purpose nature has made it one of the most popular tools for data scientists and machine learning developers. Its rich libraries are widely used for data analysis, and more importantly, for building state-of-the-art predictive models. This book is designed to guide you through using these libraries to implement effective statistical models for predictive analytics. You’ll start by delving into classical statistical analysis, where you will learn to compute descriptive statistics using pandas. You will focus on supervised learning, which will help you explore the principles of machine learning and train different machine learning models from scratch. Next, you will work with binary prediction models, such as data classification using k-nearest neighbors, decision trees, and random forests. The book will also cover algorithms for regression analysis, such as ridge and lasso regression, and their implementation in Python. In later chapters, you will learn how neural networks can be trained and deployed for more accurate predictions, and understand which Python libraries can be used to implement them. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge you need to design, build, and deploy enterprise-grade statistical models for machine learning using Python and its rich ecosystem of libraries for predictive analytics.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Training models

In this section, we will see supervised learning in action. We won't look at complicated algorithms, but we will look at how to train even a simple algorithm and machine learning best practices, such as splitting data into training and test data, and performing cross-validation.

Issues in training supervised learning models

When a model does not predict the target variable well, it underfits. This is true for both seen and unseen future data. Underfitting is when an algorithm trained to predict a value does so poorly both on the training data and on future, unseen data. Overfitting is when a model predicts training data well, but does not generalize well, and so predicts future data poorly. Data analysts...