Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

By : Imran Ahmad
5 (2)
Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

5 (2)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works. You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
13
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Practical example – how to predict the weather

Let's see how we can use the concepts developed in this chapter to predict the weather. Let's assume that we want to predict whether it will rain tomorrow based on the data collected over a year for a particular city. 

The data available to train this model is in the CSV file called weather.csv:

  1. Let's import the data as a pandas data frame:

import numpy as np 
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("weather.csv")
  1. Let's look at the columns of the data frame:

  1. Next, let's look at the header of the first 13 columns of the weather.csv data:

  1. Now, let's look at the last 10 columns of the weather.csv data:

  1. Let's use x to represent the input features. We will drop the Date field for the feature list as it is not useful in the context of predictions. We will also drop the ...