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

Encoding non-numerical columns

"Every decoding is another encoding."
David Lodge

Non-numeric data is another issue that algorithm implementations cannot deal with. In addition to the core scikit-learn implementation, scikit-learn-contrib has a list of satellite projects. These projects provide additional tools to our data arsenal, and here is how they describe themselves:

"scikit-learn-contrib is a GitHub organization for gathering high-quality, scikit-learn - compatibleprojects. It also provides a template for establishing new scikit-learn compatible projects."

We are going to use one of these projects here—category_encoders. This allows us to encode non-numerical data into different forms. First, we will install the library using the pip installer, as follows:

          pip install category_encoders
        

Before jumping into the different encoding strategies, let's first create a fictional...