Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits

By : Tarek Amr
Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits

By: Tarek Amr

Overview of this book

Machine learning is applied everywhere, from business to research and academia, while scikit-learn is a versatile library that is popular among machine learning practitioners. This book serves as a practical guide for anyone looking to provide hands-on machine learning solutions with scikit-learn and Python toolkits. The book begins with an explanation of machine learning concepts and fundamentals, and strikes a balance between theoretical concepts and their applications. Each chapter covers a different set of algorithms, and shows you how to use them to solve real-life problems. You’ll also learn about various key supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms using practical examples. Whether it is an instance-based learning algorithm, Bayesian estimation, a deep neural network, a tree-based ensemble, or a recommendation system, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of its theory and learn when to apply it. As you advance, you’ll learn how to deal with unlabeled data and when to use different clustering and anomaly detection algorithms. By the end of this machine learning book, you’ll have learned how to take a data-driven approach to provide end-to-end machine learning solutions. You’ll also have discovered how to formulate the problem at hand, prepare required data, and evaluate and deploy models in production.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Supervised Learning
8
Section 2: Advanced Supervised Learning
13
Section 3: Unsupervised Learning and More

Detecting anomalies using basic statistics

Rather than jumping straight into the available algorithms in scikit-learn, let's start by thinking about ways to detect the anomalous samples. Imagine measuring the traffic to your website every hour, which gives you the following numbers:

hourly_traffic = [
120, 123, 124, 119, 196,
121, 118, 117, 500, 132
]

Looking at these numbers, 500 sounds quite high compared to the others. Formally speaking, if the hourly traffic data is assumed to be normally distributed, then 500 is further away from its mean or expected value. We can measure this by calculating the mean of these numbers and then checking the numbers that are more than 2 or 3 standard deviations away from the mean. Similarly, we can calculate a high quantile and check which numbers are above it. Here, we find the values above the 95th percentile:

pd.Series(hourly_traffic) > pd.Series(hourly_traffic).quantile(0.95)

This code will give...