Book Image

The Data Science Workshop

By : Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare
Book Image

The Data Science Workshop

By: Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare

Overview of this book

You already know you want to learn data science, and a smarter way to learn data science is to learn by doing. The Data Science Workshop focuses on building up your practical skills so that you can understand how to develop simple machine learning models in Python or even build an advanced model for detecting potential bank frauds with effective modern data science. You'll learn from real examples that lead to real results. Throughout The Data Science Workshop, you'll take an engaging step-by-step approach to understanding data science. You won't have to sit through any unnecessary theory. If you're short on time you can jump into a single exercise each day or spend an entire weekend training a model using sci-kit learn. It's your choice. Learning on your terms, you'll build up and reinforce key skills in a way that feels rewarding. Every physical print copy of The Data Science Workshop unlocks access to the interactive edition. With videos detailing all exercises and activities, you'll always have a guided solution. You can also benchmark yourself against assessments, track progress, and receive content updates. You'll even earn a secure credential that you can share and verify online upon completion. It's a premium learning experience that's included with your printed copy. To redeem, follow the instructions located at the start of your data science book. Fast-paced and direct, The Data Science Workshop is the ideal companion for data science beginners. You'll learn about machine learning algorithms like a data scientist, learning along the way. This process means that you'll find that your new skills stick, embedded as best practice. A solid foundation for the years ahead.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Introduction

The previous chapters introduced you to very popular and extremely powerful machine learning algorithms. They all have one thing in common, which is that they belong to the same category of algorithms: supervised learning. This kind of algorithm tries to learn patterns based on a specified outcome column (target variable) such as sales, employee churn, or class of customer.

But what if you don't have such a variable in your dataset or you don't want to specify a target variable? Will you still be able to run some machine learning algorithms on it and find interesting patterns? The answer is yes, with the use of clustering algorithms that belong to the unsupervised learning category.

Clustering algorithms are very popular in the data science industry for grouping similar data points and detecting outliers. For instance, clustering algorithms can be used by banks for fraud detection by identifying unusual clusters from the data. They can also be used by e...