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

Visualizing the tree's decision boundaries

To be able to pick the right algorithm for the problem, it is important to have a conceptual understanding of how an algorithm makes its decision. As we already know by now, decision trees pick one feature at a time and try to split the data accordingly. Nevertheless, it is important to be able to visualize those decisions as well. Let me first plot our classes versus our features, then I will explain further:

When the tree made a decision to split the data around a petal width of 0.8, you can think of it as drawing a horizontal line in the right-hand side graph at the value of 0.8. Then, with every later split, the tree splits the space further using combinations of horizontal and vertical lines. By knowing this, you should not expect the algorithm to use curves or 45-degree lines to separate the classes.

One trick to plot the decision boundaries that a tree has after it has been trained...