Python - Deeper Insights into Machine Learning
Author:
Sebastian Raschka, David Julian, John Hearty
Pub Year:
2016
Source:
Read: 2018-04-08
Last Update: 2018-04-08
Five Sentence Abstract:
This is a straightforward, no nonsense book, or three, that will allow you to go from zero understanding of machine learning to quite advanced, assuming you put in the required time and effort. The code provided is detailed, extremely well explained, often line-by-line, and gives you a solid intuitive basis that will make your journey into the more advanced areas more concrete. The book starts slowly and then moves forward at a steady, but more than manageable, pace, building on the previous, often simplified examples using SKLearn, to reach more modern and advanced techniques using libraries such as Theano and Keras to leverage your GPU. It lacks some of the detail you might want when it comes to mathematical proofs, but it does include plenty math to whet your appetite; supplementing this book with a follow up with an appropriate linear algebra/algorithms math book would probably be ideal. Lastly, at the end of each chapter in the third module there are numerous resources provided for further study in regard to the more advanced topics.
Thoughts:
Overall a great book. Would recommend to anyone interested in learning about
machine learning.
It is basically 3 books in 1, separated, unsurprisingly, into beginner,
intermediate, and advanced modules.
The detailed table of contents wins points with me every time.
The first book holds your hand and offers a very nice, slow, place to start.
Compared to the other pair of beginner books I've read on the subject, this one
was far superior.
All of the code works, which I can't say about the other books, and there is
often a line-by-line explanation following each snippet.
While there isn't much in the way of real mathematical proofs, there is still
plenty of math and what the underlying algorithms look like and do. Any
understanding will help over simply using sklearn blindly. This said, after you
have some intuitive understanding of what to expect when using various
algorithms and libraries, you will be better equipped to tackle a more detailed
and abstract exploration of the underlying mathematical underpinnings.
The second book goes back over the same ideas as the first book, but in more
detail and with added depth. Great reinforcement learning. Practice, practice,
practice!
Book three is considerably more advanced. It assumes you have the stuff from
books one and two down pat. It uses the Theano and Keras libraries, which I
didn't have installed so I didn't play with the code. The little bit of the
code I did experiment with had numerous errors. This module included more
advanced topics than I was ready for, but it was interesting none-the-less to
expand my grammar for now.
Finally, there are tons of references to follow up and expand your
understanding of whatever topic may suit your fancy. Again, all in all a great
place to start if combined with another more mathematically oriented book.
Other
-
Google's DeepDream program, which became well-known for its overtrained,
hallucinogenic imagery, also uses a convolutional neural network.
-
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
everything as if it were a nail" (Abraham Maslow, 1966)
really, Maslow said this? note, I can't get away from these assholes!
I would like a more detailed explanation of what is going on here, but, since
it is matplotlib that I am not understanding, the lack of explanation can be
forgiven. It plots the colored regions of the plots; I'm not sure what the
meshgrid function is doing.
| # plot the decision surface
x1_min, x1_max = X[:, 0].min() - 1, X[:, 0].max() + 1
x2_min, x2_max = X[:, 1].min() - 1, X[:, 1].max() + 1
xx1, xx2 = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x1_min, x1_max, resolution),
np.arange(x2_min, x2_max, resolution))
Z = classifier.predict(np.array([xx1.ravel(), xx2.ravel()]).T)
Z = Z.reshape(xx1.shape)
plt.contourf(xx1, xx2, Z, alpha=0.4, cmap=cmap)
plt.xlim(xx1.min(), xx1.max())
plt.ylim(xx2.min(), xx2.max())
|
Links
-
We've added some additional notes to the code notebooks mentioning the offline
datasets in case there are server errors.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tq2qdh0oqfgsktq/AADIt7esnbiWLOQODn5q_7Dta?dl=0
-
The code bundle for the course is also hosted on GitHub at
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-Deeper-Insights-into-Machine-Learning
-
http://arxiv.org/
-
GitHub repository: MasteringMLWithPython/Chapter3/ SdA.py
Code Examples
01 perceptron.py
02_adaline.py
03_adalineSGD.py
04_sklearn_perceptron.py
05_sigmoid.py
06_logistic_regression.py
07_svm.py
08_kernal_svm.py
09_decision_tree.py
10_knn.py
11_missing_data.py
12_ordinal_nominal_features.py
13_feature_engineering.py
14_dimensionality_reduction.py
15_PCA.py
16_LDA.py
17_radial_bias_func_kernel_PCA.py
18_RBF_kernel_PCA_2.py
19_pipeline.py
20_diagnosing_bias_and_variance.py
21_grid_search.py
22_nested_cross_validation.py
23_confusion_matrix.py
24_performance_metrics.py
25_ensemble.py
26_bagging.py
27_boosting.py
28_imdb_to_csv.py
29_bag_of_words.py
30_imdb_processing.py
31_minibatch.py
32_housing.py
33_RANSAC_outliers.py
34_evaluating_linear_regression.py
35_polynomial_features.py
36_polynomial_features_housing.py
37_random_tree.py
38_k_means.py
39_clusters_heirarchical_tree.py
40_DBSCAN.py
41_Multi-layer_perceptron.py
41_mlp.pkl
42_logistic_recap.py
43_plot_sigmoids.py
44_part_2_demos.py
45_loading_image_data.py
46_part_2_batch_gradiant_descent.py
47_one_versus.py
48_imputer.py
49_adding_polynomial_complexity.py
50_PCA.py
51_ensembles.py
52_voting_ensemble.py
53_extra_tree_faces.py
54_adaboosting.py
55_gradient_tree_boosting.py
56_performance_estimation.py
57_grid_search.py
58_learning_curve.py
59_recommendation_system.py
60_PCA.py
61_k_clustering.py
62_collinearity_eigenvalues.py
63_bagging.py
64_randomForest.py
65_jitterTest.py
Further Reading
-
The Lack of A Priori Distinctions Between Learning Algorithms, (D.H. Wolpert
1996)
-
No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization, (D.H. Wolpert and W.G. Macready,
1997)
-
Neural network theory can be quite complex, thus I want to recommend two
additional resources that cover some of the concepts that we discuss in this
chapter in more detail:
-
T. Hastie, J. Friedman, and R. Tibshirani. The Elements of Statistical
Learning, Volume 2. Springer, 2009.
-
C. M. Bishop et al. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Volume 1.
Springer New York, 2006.
-
Y. Bengio. Learning Deep Architectures for AI. Foundations and Trends in
Machine Learning, 2(1):1–127, 2009. Yoshua Bengio's book is currently freely
available at http://www.iro.umontreal. ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml_book.pdf.
-
Victor Powell and Lewis Lehe provide a fantastic interactive, visual
explanation of PCA at http://setosa.io/ev/principal-component-analysis/, this
is ideal for readers who are new to the core concepts of PCA or who are not
quite getting it.
-
For a lengthier and more mathematically-involved treatment of PCA, touching
on underlying matrix transformations, Jonathon Shlens from Google research
provides a clear and thorough explanation at http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.1100.
-
For a thorough worked example that translates Jonathon's description into
clear Python code, consider Sebastian Raschka's demonstration using the Iris
dataset at http://sebastianraschka.com/Articles/2015_pca_in_3_steps.html.
-
A solid introduction is provided by Kevin Gurney in An Introduction to Neural
Networks.
-
One good option for an unfamiliar reader is the course notes from Andrej
Karpathy's course: http://cs231n.github.io/convolutional- networks/.
-
A solid place to start understanding Semi-supervised learning methods is
Xiaojin Zhu's very thorough literature survey, available at
http://pages.cs.wisc. edu/~jerryzhu/pub/ssl_survey.pdf.
-
I also recommend a tutorial by the same author, available in the slide format
at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/pub/sslicml07.pdf.
-
For readers interested in Bayesian statistics, Allen Downey's book, Think
Bayes, is a marvelous introduction (and one of my all-time favorite statistics
books): https://www.google.co.uk/#q=think+bayes.
-
There are many good resources for understanding NLP tasks. One fairly
thorough, eight-part piece, is available online at
http://textminingonline.com/dive-into- nltk-part-i-getting-started-with-nltk.
-
If you're keen to get started, one great option is to try Kaggle's for
Knowledge NLP task, which is perfectly suited as a testbed for the techniques
described in this chapter:
https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/details/part-1-
for-beginners-bag-of-words.
-
My suggested go-to introduction to feature selection is Ando Sabaas'
four-part exploration of a broad range of feature selection techniques. It's
full of Python code snippets and informed commentary. Get started at
http://blog.datadive.net/ selecting-good-features-part-i-univariate-selection/.
-
For readers with an interest in hyperparameter optimization, I recommend that
you read Alice Zheng's posts on Turi's blog as a great place to start:
http://blog.turi.
com/how-to-evaluate-machine-learning-models-part-4-hyperparameter- tuning.
-
I also find the scikit-learn documentation to be a useful reference for grid
search specifically: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/grid_search.html.
-
Perhaps the most wide-ranging and informative tour of Ensembles and ensemble
types is provided by the Kaggle competitor, Triskelion, at http://mlwave.com/
kaggle-ensembling-guide/.
-
For a walkthrough on applying random forest ensembles to commercial contexts,
with plenty of space given to all-important diagnostic charts and reasoning,
consider Arshavir Blackwell's blog at
https://citizennet.com/blog/2012/11/10/random-
forests-ensembles-and-performance-metrics/.
-
The Lasagne User Guide is thorough and worth reading. Find it at
http://lasagne. readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.
-
Similarly, find the TensorFlow tutorials at https://www.tensorflow.org/
versions/r0.9/get_started/index.html.
Exceptional Excerpts:
This [The expression of emotion in 20th century books
(Acerbi et al, 2013)] study is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it is
an example of data-driven science, where previously considered soft sciences,
such as sociology and anthropology, are given a solid empirical footing.
For data to become information, it requires some
meaningful structure.
fill in the missing values through a process of imputation.
For classification, we can simply use the statistics of the mean, median, and
mode over the observed features to impute the missing values.
Many machine learning algorithms require that features are
standardized. This means that they will work best when the individual features
look more or less like normally distributed data with near-zero mean and unit
variance. The easiest way to do this is by subtracting the mean value from each
feature and scaling it by dividing by the standard deviation. This can be
achieved by the scale() function or the standardScaler() function in the
sklearn.preprocessing() function. Although these functions will accept sparse
data, they probably should not be used in such situations because centering
sparse data would likely destroy its structure. It is recommended to use the
MacAbsScaler() or maxabs_scale() function in these cases. The former scales and
translates each feature individually by its maximum absolute value. The latter
scales each feature individually to a range of [-1,1]. Another specific case
is when we have outliers in the data. In these cases using the robust_scale()
or RobustScaler() function is recommended.
Bagging is primarily a variance reduction technique and
boosting is primarily a bias reduction technique.
GoogLeNet was designed to tackle computer vision
challenges involving Internet-quality image data, that is, images that have
been captured in real contexts where the pose, lighting, occlusion, and clutter
of images vary significantly. GoogLeNet was applied to the 2014 ImageNet
challenge with noteworthy success, achieving only 6.7% error rate on the test
dataset. ImageNet images are small, high-granularity images taken from many,
varied classes.
Notes:
Table of Contents
Module 1: Python Machine Learning
01: Giving Computers the Ability to Learn from Data
02: Training Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification
03: A Tour of Machine Learning Classifiers Using Scikit-learn
04: Building Good Training Sets – Data Preprocessing
05: Compressing Data via Dimensionality Reduction
06: Learning Best Practices for Model Evaluation and Hyperparameter Tuning
07: Combining Different Models for Ensemble Learning
08: Applying Machine Learning to Sentiment Analysis
09: Embedding a Machine Learning Model into a Web Application
10: Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis
11: Working with Unlabeled Data – Clustering Analysis
12: Training Artificial Neural Networks for Image Recognition
13: Parallelizing Neural Network Training with Theano
Module 2: Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python
01: Thinking in Machine Learning
02: Tools and Techniques
03: Turning Data into Information
04: Models – Learning from Information
05: Linear Models
06: Neural Networks
07: Features – How Algorithms See the World
08: Learning with Ensembles
09: Design Strategies and Case Studies
Module 3: Advanced Machine Learning with Python
01: Unsupervised Machine Learning
02: Deep Belief Networks
03: Stacked Denoising Autoencoders
04: Convolutional Neural Networks
05: Semi-Supervised Learning
06: Text Feature Engineering
07: Feature Engineering Part II
08: Ensemble Methods
09: Additional Python Machine Learning Tools
- // Pages numbers from book.
Module 1: Python Machine Learning
page 004:
page 010:
page 012:
page 14:
-
The Lack of A Priori Distinctions Between Learning Algorithms, (D.H. Wolpert
1996)
-
No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization, (D.H. Wolpert and W.G. Macready,
1997)
-
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
everything as if it were a nail" (Abraham Maslow, 1966)
-
hyperparameter optimization techniques that
help us to fine-tune the performance of our model in later chapters.
Intuitively, we can think of those hyperparameters as parameters that are not
learned from the data but represent the knobs of a model that we can turn to
improve its performance
page 24:
- // Easy to follow mathematics of perceptron.
page 25:
- It is important to note that the convergence of the perceptron is only
guaranteed if the two classes are linearly separable and the learning rate is
sufficiently small.
page 026:
page 035:
page 36:
- (batch) gradient descent.
page 44:
- stochastic gradient descent, sometimes also
called iterative or on-line gradient descent
page 45:
-
To obtain accurate results via stochastic gradient descent, it is important
to present it with data in a random order, which is why we want to shuffle the
training set for every epoch to prevent cycles.
-
eta may be made to decrease over time in stochastic gradient descent.
-
Another advantage of stochastic gradient descent is that we can use it for
online learning. In online learning, our model is trained on-the-fly as new
training data arrives.
-
A compromise between batch gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent
is the so-called mini-batch learning. Mini-batch
learning can be understood as applying batch gradient descent to smaller
subsets of the training data—for example, 50 samples at a time. The advantage
over batch gradient descent is that convergence is reached faster via
mini-batches because of the more frequent weight updates. Furthermore,
mini-batch learning allows us to replace the for-loop over the training samples
in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) by
vectorized operations, which can further improve the computational efficiency
of our learning algorithm.
page 51:
- In practice, it is always recommended that you compare the performance of at
least a handful of different learning algorithms to select the best model for
the particular problem
page 52:
- The five main steps that are involved in training a machine learning
algorithm can be summarized as follows:
| 1. Selection of features.
2. Choosing a performance metric.
3. Choosing a classifier and optimization algorithm.
4. Evaluating the performance of the model.
5. Tuning the algorithm.
|
page 55:
- Instead of the misclassification error, many machine learning practitioners
report the classification accuracy of a model, which is simply calculated as
follows:
| if misclassification error = 0.089
1 - misclassification error = 0.911 or 91.1 percent.
|
page 60:
- In logistic regression, this activation
function simply becomes the sigmoid function that we defined earlier... The
output of the sigmoid function is then interpreted as the probability of
particular sample belonging to class 1
page 61:
- Logistic regression is used in weather forecasting, for example, to not only
predict if it will rain on a particular day but also to report the chance of
rain. Similarly, logistic regression can be used to predict the chance that a
patient has a particular disease given certain symptoms, which is why logistic
regression enjoys wide popularity in the field of medicine.
page 68:
-
The concept behind regularization is to
introduce additional information (bias) to penalize extreme parameter weights.
The most common form of regularization is the so-called L2 regularization
(sometimes also called L2 shrinkage or weight decay)
-
Regularization is another reason why feature scaling such as standardization
is important. For regularization to work properly, we need to ensure that all
our features are on comparable scales.
page 70:
- Consequently, decreasing the value of the inverse regularization parameter C
means that we are increasing the regularization strength
page 71:
- the support vector machine (SVM), which can be
considered as an extension of the perceptron. Using the perceptron algorithm,
we minimized misclassification errors. However, in SVMs, our optimization
objective is to maximize the margin.
page 074:
page 76:
-
In practical classification tasks, linear logistic regression and linear SVMs
often yield very similar results. Logistic regression tries to maximize the
conditional likelihoods of the training data, which makes it more prone to
outliers than SVMs. The SVMs mostly care about the points that are closest to
the decision boundary (support vectors). On the other hand, logistic regression
has the advantage that it is a simpler model that can be implemented more
easily. Furthermore, logistic regression models can be easily updated, which is
attractive when working with streaming data.
-
sometimes our datasets are too large to fit into computer memory. Thus,
scikit-learn also offers alternative implementations via the SGDClassifier class, which also supports online
learning via the partial_fit method. The concept behind the SGDClassifier class
is similar to the stochastic gradient algorithm
| >>> from sklearn.linear_model import SGDClassifier
>>> ppn = SGDClassifier(loss='perceptron')
>>> lr = SGDClassifier(loss='log')
>>> svm = SGDClassifier(loss='hinge')
|
page 078:
page 79:
One of the most widely used kernels is the Radial Basis
Function kernel (RBF kernel) or Gaussian kernel
page 84:
-
information gain is simply the difference
between the impurity of the parent node and the sum of the child node
impurities—the lower the impurity of the child nodes, the larger the
information gain. However, for simplicity and to reduce the combinatorial
search space, most libraries (including scikit-learn)
implement binary decision trees. This means that each parent node is
split into two child nodes
-
the three impurity measures or splitting criteria that are commonly used in
binary decision trees are Gini impurity (I_G), entropy
(I_H), and the classification error (I_E).
page 85:
- However, in practice both the Gini impurity and
entropy typically yield very similar results and it is often not worth spending
much time on evaluating trees using different impurity criteria rather than
experimenting with different pruning cut-offs.
page 86:
- classification error is a useful criterion for
pruning but not recommended for growing a decision tree, since it is
less sensitive to changes in the class probabilities of the nodes.
page 94:
- KNN (k-nearest neighbors) is a typical example
of a lazy learner. It is called lazy not because of its apparent simplicity,
but because it doesn't learn a discriminative function from the training data
but memorizes the training dataset instead.
page 95:
-
Parametric versus nonparametric models:
-
Machine learning algorithms can be grouped into parametric and nonparametric
models. Using parametric models, we estimate parameters from the training
dataset to learn a function that can classify new data points without requiring
the original training dataset anymore. Typical examples of parametric models
are the perceptron, logistic regression, and the linear SVM. In contrast,
nonparametric models can't be characterized by a fixed set of parameters, and
the number of parameters grows with the training data. Two examples of
nonparametric models that we have seen so far are the decision tree
classifier/random forest and the kernel SVM.
-
KNN belongs to a subcategory of nonparametric models that is described as
instance-based learning. Models based on instance-based learning are
characterized by memorizing the training dataset, and lazy learning is a special case of instance-based learning
that is associated with no (zero) cost during the learning process.
page 96:
-
The main advantage of such a memory-based approach is that the classifier
immediately adapts as we collect new training data. However, the downside is
that the computational complexity for classifying new samples grows linearly
with the number of samples in the training dataset in the worst-case scenario
-
Furthermore, we can't discard training samples since no training step is
involved. Thus, storage space can become a challenge if we are working with
large datasets.
page 98:
-
The curse of dimensionality = It is important to mention that KNN is very
susceptible to overfitting due to the curse of dimensionality. The curse of
dimensionality describes the phenomenon where the feature space becomes
increasingly sparse for an increasing number of dimensions of a fixed-size
training dataset. Intuitively, we can think of even the closest neighbors being
too far away in a high-dimensional space to give a good estimate.
-
in models where regularization is not applicable such as decision trees and
KNN, we can use feature selection and dimensionality reduction techniques to
help us avoid the curse of dimensionality.
page 103:
- Although scikit-learn was developed for working with NumPy arrays, it can
sometimes be more convenient to preprocess data using pandas' DataFrame. We can
always access the underlying NumPy array of the DataFrame via the values
attribute before we feed it into a scikit-learn estimator:
| >>> df.values
array([[ 1., 2., 3., 4.],
[ 5., 6., nan, 8.],
[10., 11., 12., nan]])
|
- One of the easiest ways to deal with missing data is to simply remove the
corresponding features (columns) or samples (rows) from the dataset entirely;
rows with missing values can be easily dropped via the dropna method:
| >>> df.dropna()
A B C D
0 1 2 3 4
|
- Similarly, we can drop columns that have at least one NaN in any row by
setting the axis argument to 1:
| >>> df.dropna(axis=1)
A B
0 1 2
1 5 6
2 10 11
|
- The dropna method supports several additional parameters that can come in
handy:
| # only drop rows where all columns are NaN
>>> df.dropna(how='all')
# drop rows that have not at least 4 non-NaN values
>>> df.dropna(thresh=4)
# only drop rows where NaN appear in specific columns (here: 'C')
>>> df.dropna(subset=['C'])
|
page 104:
-
One of the most common interpolation techniques is mean imputation, where we
simply replace the missing value by the mean value of the entire feature
column. A convenient way to achieve this is by using the Imputer class from scikit-learn,
-
The Imputer class belongs to the so-called
transformer classes in scikit-learn that are used for data transformation.
The two essential methods of those estimators are fit
and transform. The fit method is used to learn the parameters from the
training data, and the transform method uses those parameters to transform the
data. Any data array that is to be transformed needs to have the same number of
features as the data array that was used to fit the model.
page 105:
page 106:
- Ordinal features can be understood as categorical values that can be sorted
or ordered. For example, T-shirt size would be an
ordinal feature, because we can define an order XL > L > M. In contrast,
nominal features don't imply any order and, to continue with the previous
example, we could think of T-shirt color as a nominal feature since it
typically doesn't make sense to say that, for example, red is larger than
blue.
page 112:
-
Now, there are two common approaches to bringing different features onto the
same scale: normalization and standardization.
-
normalization refers to the rescaling of the features to a range of [0, 1],
which is a special case of min-max scaling.
page 113:
-
Using standardization, we center the feature columns at mean 0 with standard
deviation 1 so that the feature columns take the form of a normal distribution,
which makes it easier to learn the weights. Furthermore, standardization
maintains useful information about outliers and makes the algorithm less
sensitive to them in contrast to min-max scaling
-
Here, μ_x is the sample mean of a particular feature column and σ_x the
corresponding standard deviation, respectively.
page 120:
- There are two main categories of dimensionality
reduction techniques: feature selection and feature extraction. Using
feature selection, we select a subset of the original features. In feature
extraction, we derive information from the feature set to construct a new
feature subspace.
page 128:
-
However, as far as interpretability is concerned, the random forest technique
comes with an important gotcha that is worth mentioning. For instance, if two
or more features are highly correlated, one feature may be ranked very highly
while the information of the other feature(s) may not be fully captured. On the
other hand, we don't need to be concerned about this problem if we are merely
interested in the predictive performance of a model rather than the
interpretation of feature importances.
-
scikit-learn also implements a transform method that selects features based
on a user-specified threshold after model fitting, which is useful if we want
to use the RandomForestClassifier as a feature selector and intermediate step
in a scikit-learn pipeline
page 130:
-
Feature extraction is typically used to improve computational efficiency but
can also help to reduce the curse of dimensionality—especially if we are
working with nonregularized models.
-
Principal component analysis (PCA) is an
unsupervised linear transformation technique that is widely used across
different fields, most prominently for dimensionality reduction.
-
PCA helps us to identify patterns in data based on the correlation between
features. In a nutshell, PCA aims to find the directions of maximum variance in
high-dimensional data and projects it onto a new subspace with equal or fewer
dimensions that the original one.
page 131:
- Note that the PCA directions are highly sensitive to data scaling, and we
need to standardize the features prior to PCA if the features were measured on
different scales and we want to assign equal importance to all features.
page 133:
- Although the numpy.linalg.eig function was designed to decompose nonsymmetric
square matrices, you may find that it returns complex eigenvalues in certain
cases. A related function, numpy.linalg.eigh, has been implemented to
decompose Hermetian matrices, which is a numerically more stable approach to
work with symmetric matrices such as the covariance matrix; numpy.linalg.eigh
always returns real eigenvalues.
page 140:
-
Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) can be used
as a technique for feature extraction to increase the computational efficiency
and reduce the degree of over-fitting due to the curse of dimensionality in
nonregularized models.
-
Both LDA and PCA are linear transformation techniques that can be used to
reduce the number of dimensions in a dataset; the former is an unsupervised
algorithm, whereas the latter is supervised.
page 141:
- One assumption in LDA is that the data is normally
distributed. Also, we assume that the classes have identical covariance
matrices and that the features are statistically independent of each
other. However, even if one or more of those assumptions are slightly
violated, LDA for dimensionality reduction can still work reasonably well
page 151:
- via kernel PCA we perform a nonlinear mapping
that transforms the data onto a higher-dimensional space and use standard PCA
in this higher-dimensional space to project the data back onto a
lower-dimensional space
page 153:
- Basically, the kernel function (or simply kernel) can be understood as a
function that calculates a dot product between two vectors—a measure of
similarity.
page 154:
page 169:
- Using PCA, we projected data onto a lower-dimensional subspace to maximize
the variance along the orthogonal feature axes while ignoring the class labels.
LDA, in contrast to PCA, is a technique for supervised dimensionality
reduction, which means that it considers class information in the training
dataset to attempt to maximize the class-separability in a linear feature
space. Lastly, you learned about a kernelized version of PCA, which allows you
to map nonlinear datasets onto a lower-dimensional feature space where the
classes become linearly separable.
page 174:
page 176:
- A disadvantage of the holdout method is that the performance estimate is
sensitive to how we partition the training set into the training and validation
subsets; the estimate will vary for different samples of the data.
page 177:
-
In k-fold cross-validation, we randomly split
the training dataset into k folds without replacement, where k −1 folds are
used for the model training and one fold is used for testing. This procedure is
repeated k times so that we obtain k models and performance estimates.
-
In case you are not familiar with the terms sampling
with and without replacement, let's walk through a simple thought
experiment. Let's assume we are playing a lottery game where we randomly draw
numbers from an urn. We start with an urn that holds five unique numbers 0, 1,
2, 3, and 4, and we draw exactly one number each turn. In the first round, the
chance of drawing a particular number from the urn would be 1/5. Now, in
sampling without replacement, we do not put the number back into the urn after
each turn. Consequently, the probability of drawing a particular number from
the set of remaining numbers in the next round depends on the previous round.
For example, if we have a remaining set of numbers 0, 1, 2, and 4, the chance
of drawing number 0 would become 1/4 in the next turn.
-
However, in random sampling with replacement, we always return the drawn
number to the urn so that the probabilities of drawing a particular number at
each turn does not change; we can draw the same number more than once. In other
words, in sampling with replacement, the samples (numbers) are independent and
have a covariance zero.
page 178:
- The standard value for k in k-fold cross-validation is 10, which is typically
a reasonable choice for most applications. However, if we are working with
relatively small training sets, it can be useful to increase the number of
folds. If we increase the value of k, more training data will be used in each
iteration, which results in a lower bias towards estimating the generalization
performance by averaging the individual model estimates. However, large values
of k will also increase the runtime of the cross-validation algorithm and yield
estimates with higher variance since the training folds will be more similar to
each other. On the other hand, if we are working with large datasets, we can
choose a smaller value for k, for example, k = 5 , and still obtain an accurate
estimate of the average performance of the model while reducing the
computational cost of refitting and evaluating the model on the different
folds.
page 179:
- In stratified cross-validation, the class
proportions are preserved in each fold to ensure that each fold is
representative of the class proportions in the training dataset,
page 182:
page 183:
- The graph in the upper-left shows a model with high bias. This model has both
low training and cross-validation accuracy, which indicates that it underfits
the training data. Common ways to address this issue are to increase the number
of parameters of the model, for example, by collecting or constructing
additional features, or by decreasing the degree of regularization, for
example, in SVM or logistic regression classifiers. The graph in the
upper-right shows a model that suffers from high variance, which is indicated
by the large gap between the training and cross-validation accuracy. To address
this problem of overfitting, we can collect more training data or reduce the
complexity of the model, for example, by increasing the regularization
parameter; for unregularized models, it can also help to decrease the number of
features via feature selection (Chapter 4, Building Good Training Sets – Data
Preprocessing) or feature extraction (Chapter 5, Compressing Data via
Dimensionality Reduction).
page 187:
-
In machine learning, we have two types of parameters:
those that are learned from the training data, for example, the weights in
logistic regression, and the parameters of a learning algorithm that are
optimized separately. The latter are the tuning parameters, also called
hyperparameters, of a model, for example, the
regularization parameter in logistic regression or the depth parameter of a
decision tree.
-
hyperparameter optimization technique called grid
search that can further help to improve the performance of a model by
finding the optimal combination of hyperparameter values.
page 188:
- The approach of grid search is quite simple, it's a brute-force exhaustive
search paradigm where we specify a list of values for different
hyperparameters, and the computer evaluates the model performance for each
combination of those to obtain the optimal set
page 189:
- Although grid search is a powerful approach for finding the optimal set of
parameters, the evaluation of all possible parameter combinations is also
computationally very expensive. An alternative approach to sampling different
parameter combinations using scikit-learn is randomized search. Using the
RandomizedSearchCV class in scikit-learn, we can draw random parameter
combinations from sampling distributions with a specified budget.
page 190:
page 192:
page 193:
- The error (ERR) can be understood as the sum
of all false predictions divided by the number of total predictions, and the
accuracy (ACC) is calculated as the sum of
correct predictions divided by the total number of predictions
page 194:
- The true positive rate (TPR) and false positive rate
(FPR) are performance metrics that are especially useful for imbalanced
class problems:
-
Precision (PRE) and recall (REC) are
performance metrics that are related to those true positive and true negative
rates, and in fact, recall is synonymous to the true positive rate
-
In practice, often a combination of precision and recall is used, the
so-called F1-score:
page 195:
- Remember that the positive class in scikit-learn is the class that is labeled
as class 1. If we want to specify a different positive label, we can construct
our own scorer via the make_scorer function, which we can then directly provide
as an argument to the scoring parameter in GridSearchCV:
| >>> from sklearn.metrics import make_scorer, f1_score
>>> scorer = make_scorer(f1_score, pos_label=0)
>>> gs = GridSearchCV(estimator=pipe_svc,
... param_grid=param_grid,
... scoring=scorer,
... cv=10)
|
-
Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) graphs
are useful tools for selecting models for classification based on their
performance with respect to the false positive and true positive rates, which
are computed by shifting the decision threshold of the classifier. The diagonal
of an ROC graph can be interpreted as random guessing, and classification
models that fall below the diagonal are considered as worse than random
guessing. A perfect classifier would fall into the top-left corner of the graph
with a true positive rate of 1 and a false positive rate of 0. Based on the ROC
curve, we can then compute the so-called area under the
curve (AUC) to characterize the performance of a classification model
-
ROC AUC and accuracy metrics mostly agree with each other
page 199:
-
The scoring metrics that we discussed in this section are specific to binary
classification systems. However, scikit-learn also implements macro and micro
averaging methods to extend those scoring metrics to multiclass problems via
One vs. All (OvA) classification. The micro-average is calculated from the
individual true positives, true negatives, false positives, and false negatives
of the system. For example, the micro-average of the precision score in a
k-class system can be calculated as follows:
-
Micro-averaging is useful if we want to weight each instance or prediction
equally, whereas macro-averaging weights all classes equally to evaluate the
overall performance of a classifier with regard to the most frequent class
labels.
page 202:
page 203:
page 207:
page 212:
- Although our MajorityVoteClassifier
implementation is very useful for demonstration purposes, I also implemented a
more sophisticated version of the majority vote classifier in scikit-learn. It
will become available as sklearn.ensemble.VotingClassifier in the next release
version (v0.17).
page 221:
page 222:
-
instead of using the same training set to fit the individual classifiers in
the ensemble, we draw bootstrap samples (random samples with replacement) from
the initial training set, which is why bagging is also
known as bootstrap aggregating.
-
random forests are a special case of bagging where we also use random feature
subsets to fit the individual decision trees.
page 226:
- The original boosting procedure is summarized
in four key steps as follows:
| 1. Draw a random subset of training samples d1 without replacement from the
training set D to train a weak learner C1.
2. Draw second random training subset d 2 without replacement from the training
set and add 50 percent of the samples that were previously misclassified to
train a weak learner C2.
3. Find the training samples d 3 in the training set D on which C 1 and C2
disagree to train a third weak learner C3.
4. Combine the weak learners C1 , C2 , and C3 via majority voting.
|
page 227:
- In contrast to the original boosting procedure as described here, AdaBoost uses the complete training set to train the
weak learners where the training samples are reweighted in each iteration to
build a strong classifier that learns from the mistakes of the previous weak
learners in the ensemble.
page 238:
- bag-of-words model that allows us to represent
text as numerical feature vectors. The idea behind the bag-of-words model is
quite simple and can be summarized as follows:
| 1. We create a vocabulary of unique tokens—for example, words—from the entire
set of documents.
2. We construct a feature vector from each document that contains the counts
of how often each word occurs in the particular document.
|
page 239:
-
The sequence of items in the bag-of-words model that
we just created is also called the 1-gram or unigram model—each item or
token in the vocabulary represents a single word. More generally, the
contiguous sequences of items in NLP—words, letters, or symbols—is also called
an n-gram. The choice of the number n in the n-gram model depends on the
particular application; for example, a study by Kanaris et al. revealed that
n-grams of size 3 and 4 yield good performances in anti-spam filtering of
e-mail messages
-
raw term frequencies: tf(t,d) — the number of
times a term t occurs in a document d.
page 240:
- Those frequently occurring words typically don't contain useful or
discriminatory information. In this subsection, we will learn about a useful
technique called term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) that can be
used to downweight those frequently occurring words in the feature vectors. The
tf-idf can be defined as the product of the term frequency and the inverse
document frequency:
page 245:
- stop-word removal. Stop-words are simply those
words that are extremely common in all sorts of texts and likely bear no (or
only little) useful information that can be used to distinguish between
different classes of documents. Examples of stop-words are is, and, has, and
the like. Removing stop-words can be useful if we are
working with raw or normalized term frequencies rather than tf-idfs, which are
already downweighting frequently occurring words.
page 249:
- we can't use the CountVectorizer for out-of-core learning since it requires
holding the complete vocabulary in memory. Also, the TfidfVectorizer needs to
keep the all feature vectors of the training dataset in memory to calculate the
inverse document frequencies. However, another useful vectorizer for text
processing implemented in scikit-learn is HashingVectorizer.
- // Flask, SQLite, PythonAnywhere.
page 279:
- Regression models are used to predict target
variables on a continuous scale
page 280:
- This best-fitting line is also called the regression
line, and the vertical lines from the regression line to the sample
points are the so-called offsets or
residuals—the errors of our prediction.
page 287:
- Essentially, OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) linear
regression can be understood as Adaline without the unit step function
so that we obtain continuous target values instead of the class labels -1 and
1.
page 293:
-
Linear regression models can be heavily impacted by the presence of outliers.
-
As an alternative to throwing out outliers, we will look at a robust method
of regression using the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, which fits
a regression model to a subset of the data, the so-called inliers.
-
We can summarize the iterative RANSAC algorithm as follows:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 | 1. Select a random number of samples to be inliers and fit the model.
2. Test all other data points against the fitted model and add those points
that fall within a user-given tolerance to the inliers.
3. Refit the model using all inliers.
4. Estimate the error of the fitted model versus the inliers.
5. Terminate the algorithm if the performance meets a certain user-defined
threshold or if a fixed number of iterations has been reached; go back to step
1 otherwise.
|
page 300:
- A Ridge Regression model can be initialized as follows:
| >>> from sklearn.linear_model import Ridge
>>> ridge = Ridge(alpha=1.0)
|
- Note that the regularization strength is regulated by the parameter alpha,
which is similar to the parameter λ . Likewise, we can initialize a LASSO
regressor from the linear_model submodule:
| >>> from sklearn.linear_model import Lasso
>>> lasso = Lasso(alpha=1.0)
|
- Lastly, the ElasticNet implementation allows us to vary the L1 to L2 ratio:
| >>> from sklearn.linear_model import ElasticNet
>>> lasso = ElasticNet(alpha=1.0, l1_ratio=0.5)
|
- For example, if we set l1_ratio to 1.0, the ElasticNet regressor would be
equal to LASSO regression.
page 306:
-
A random forest, which is an ensemble of
multiple decision trees, can be understood as the sum of piecewise linear
functions
-
An advantage of the decision tree algorithm is that it does not require any
transformation of the features if we are dealing with nonlinear data.
page 307:
- In the context of decision tree regression, the MSE is often also referred to
as within-node variance, which is why the splitting criterion is also better
known as variance reduction.
page 314:
- Prototype-based clustering means that each
cluster is represented by a prototype, which can either be the centroid (average) of similar points with continuous
features, or the medoid (the most representative or
most frequently occurring point) in the case of categorical features.
page 328:
- In divisive hierarchical clustering, we start
with one cluster that encompasses all our samples, and we iteratively split the
cluster into smaller clusters until each cluster only contains one sample. In
this section, we will focus on agglomerative
clustering, which takes the opposite approach. We start with each sample
as an individual cluster and merge the closest pairs of clusters until only one
cluster remains.
page 331:
-
in linkage. However, we should not use the
squareform distance matrix that we defined earlier, since it would yield
different distance values from those expected. To sum it up, the three possible
scenarios are listed here:
-
Incorrect approach: In this approach, we use the squareform distance matrix.
The code is as follows:
| >>> from scipy.cluster.hierarchy import linkage
>>> row_clusters = linkage(row_dist,
method='complete',
metric='euclidean')
|
- Correct approach: In this approach, we use the condensed distance matrix.
The code is as follows:
| >>> row_clusters = linkage(pdist(df, metric='euclidean'),
method='complete')
|
- Correct approach: In this approach, we use the input sample matrix. The code
is as follows:
| >>> row_clusters = linkage(df.values,
method='complete',
metric='euclidean')
|
page 336:
- Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with
Noise (DBSCAN). The notion of density in DBSCAN is defined as the number
of points within a specified radius epsilon.
page 337:
page 347:
page 349:
page 351:
- The MLP (Multi-layer perceptron) is a typical example
of a feedforward artificial neural network. The term feedforward refers
to the fact that each layer serves as the input to the next layer without loops
page 353:
-
Neural network theory can be quite complex, thus I want to recommend two
additional resources that cover some of the concepts that we discuss in this
chapter in more detail:
-
T. Hastie, J. Friedman, and R. Tibshirani. The Elements of Statistical
Learning, Volume 2. Springer, 2009.
-
C. M. Bishop et al. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Volume 1.
Springer New York, 2006.
page 373:
page 375:
- Automatic differentiation comes with two
modes, the forward and the reverse mode, respectively. Backpropagation is
simply just a special case of the reverse-mode automatic differentiation. The
key point is that applying the chain rule in the forward mode can be quite
expensive since we would have to multiply large matrices for each layer
(Jacobians) that we eventually multiply by a vector to obtain the output. The
trick of the reverse mode is that we start from right to left: we multiply a
matrix by a vector, which yields another vector that is multiplied by the next
matrix and so on. Matrix-vector multiplication is computationally much cheaper
than matrix- matrix multiplication, which is why backpropagation is one of the
most popular algorithms used in neural network training.
page 383:
- Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs or
ConvNets) gained popularity in computer vision due to their
extraordinary good performance on image classification tasks.
page 385:
- Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can be
thought of as feedforward neural networks with feedback loops or
backpropagation through time. In RNNs, the neurons only fire for a limited
amount of time before they are (temporarily) deactivated. In turn, these
neurons activate other neurons that fire at a later point in time. Basically,
we can think of recurrent neural networks as MLPs with an additional time
variable.
page 386:
-
A great collection of Theano tutorials can be found at http://deeplearning.net/
software/theano/tutorial/index.html#tutorial.
-
There are also a number of interesting libraries that are being actively
developed to train neural networks in Theano, which you should keep on your
radar:
| Pylearn2 (http://deeplearning.net/software/pylearn2/)
Lasagne (https://lasagne.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)
Keras (http://keras.io)
|
page 392:
- // Theano allows you to use GPUs.
page 393:
- Tensors can be understood as a generalization of scalars, vectors, matrices,
and so on. More concretely, a scalar can be defined as a rank-0 tensor, a
vector as a rank-1 tensor, a matrix as rank-2 tensor, and matrices stacked in a
third dimension as rank-3 tensors.
page 394:
// Can not get Theano to install, Scipy was installed via
apt and uninstalling it will also uninstall a number of other programs. So, I
skimmed the rest of this chapter. It seems straight forward enough.
page 403:
- Technically, we could use any function as activation function in multilayer
neural networks as long as it is differentiable.
page 404:
page 406:
- The softmax function is a generalization of
the logistic function that allows us to compute meaningful class-probabilities
in multi-class settings (multinomial logistic regression).
page 407:
- Another sigmoid function that is often used in the hidden layers of
artificial neural networks is the hyperbolic tangent
(tanh), which can be interpreted as a rescaled version of the logistic
function.
page 408:
- The advantage of the hyperbolic tangent over the logistic function is that it
has a broader output spectrum and ranges the open interval (-1, 1), which can
improve the convergence of the back propagation algorithm
page 410:
- // Keras, built on Theano, skimmed, looks straight
forward.
page 415:
- Although Keras is a great library for implementing and experimenting with
neural networks, there are many other Theano wrapper libraries that are worth
mentioning. A prominent example is Pylearn2 (http://deeplearning.net/software/
pylearn2/), which has been developed in the LISA lab in Montreal. Also,
Lasagne (https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne) may be of interest to you if you
prefer a more minimalistic but extensible library, that offers more control
over the underlying Theano code.
page 417:
- follow the works of the leading experts in this field, such as Geoff Hinton
(http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/), Andrew Ng (http://www.andrewng. org),
Yann LeCun (http://yann.lecun.com), Juergen Schmidhuber (http://
people.idsia.ch/~juergen/), and Yoshua Bengio (http://www.iro.umontreal.
ca/~bengioy),
page 424:
- This [The expression of emotion in 20th century books
(Acerbi et al, 2013)] study is interesting for several reasons. Firstly,
it is an example of data-driven science, where previously considered soft sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, are given
a solid empirical footing.
page 429:
page 446:
page 448:
- //UML, Unified Modeling Language.
page 451:
page 458:
- NumPy builds on these data objects by providing two further objects: an
N-dimensional array object (ndarray) and a universal function object (ufunc).
The ufunc object provides element-by-element operations on ndarray objects,
allowing typecasting and array broadcasting. Typecasting is the process of
changing one data type into another, and broadcasting describes how arrays of
different sizes are treated during arithmetic operations.
page 475:
- There are two different K-NN classifiers in Sklearn. KNeighborsClassifier requires the user to specify k,
the number of nearest neighbors. RadiusNeighborsClassifier, on the other hand,
implements learning based on the number of neighbors within a fixed radius, r,
of each training point.
page 477:
- For the Ordinary Least Squares to work, we assume
that the features are independent. When these terms are correlated, then
the matrix, X, can approach singularity. This means that the estimates become
highly sensitive to small changes in the input data. This is known as multicollinearity and results in a large variance and
ultimately instability.
page 478:
-
Ridge regression not only addresses the issue
of multicollinearity, but also situations where the number of input variables
greatly exceeds the number of samples. The linear_model.Ridge() object uses what is known as L2
regularization. Intuitively, we can understand this as adding a penalty
on the extreme values of the weight vector. This is sometimes called shrinkage
because it makes the average weights smaller. This tends to make the model more
stable because it reduces its sensitivity to extreme values.
-
The Sklearn object, linear_model.ridge, adds a regularization parameter,
alpha. Generally, small positive values for alpha improves the model's
stability. It can either be a float or an array. If it is an array, it is
assumed that the array corresponds to specific targets, and therefore, it must
be the same size as the target.
-
Determining what is redundant or irrelevant is the major function of dimensionality reduction algorithms. There are
basically two approaches: feature extraction and feature selection. Feature selection attempts to find a subset of the
original feature variables. Feature extraction,
on the other hand, creates new feature variables by combining correlated
variables.
page 479:
-
most common feature extraction algorithm, that is, Principle Component Analysis or PCA. This uses an
orthogonal transformation to convert a set of correlated variables into a set
of uncorrelated variables. The important information, the length of vectors,
and the angle between them does not change.
-
Probably the most versatile kernel function, and the one that gives good
results in most situations, is the Radial Basis
Function (RBF). The rbf kernel takes a parameter, gamma, which can be
loosely interpreted as the inverse of the sphere of influence of each sample. A
low value of gamma means that each sample has a large radius of influence on
samples selected by the model. The KernalPCA fit_transform method takes the
training vector, fits it to the model, and then transforms it into its
principle components.
page 483:
- For data to become information, it requires some
meaningful structure.
page 484:
- When faced with an unseen dataset, the first phase is exploration. Data
exploration involves examining the components and structure of data. How many
samples does it contain, and how many dimensions are in each sample? What are
the data types of each dimension? We should also get a feel for the
relationships between variables and how they are distributed. We need to check
whether the data values are in line with what we expect. Are there are any
obvious errors or gaps in the data?
page 485:
- Parallelism is a growing area of machine learning, and it encompasses a
number of different approaches, from harnessing the capabilities of multi-core
processors, to large-scale distributed computing on many different platforms.
Probably, the most common method is to simply run the same algorithm on many
machines, each with a different set of parameters. Another method is to
decompose a learning algorithm into an adaptive sequence of queries, and have
these queries processed in parallel. A common implementation of this technique
is known as MapReduce, or its open source version, Hadoop.
page 487:
- Integrating different data sets can take a significant amount of development
time; up to 90 percent in some cases.
page 489:
page 490:
page 491:
page 492:
page 501:
page 503:
- Another format that we are likely to come across is the Acrobats Portable
Document Format (PDF). Importing data from PDF files can be quite difficult
because PDF files are built on page layout primitives, and unlike HTML or JSON,
they do not have meaningful markup tags. There are several non-Python tools for
turning PDFs into text such as pdftotext. This
is a command line tool that is included in many Linux distributions and is also
available for Windows. Once we have converted the PDF file into text, we still
need to extract the data, and the data embedded in the document determines how
we can extract it. If the data is separated from the rest of the document, say
in a table, then we can use Python's text parsing tools to extract it.
Alternatively, we can use a Python library for working with PDF documents such
as pdfminer3k.
page 529:
- This is described by the terms variance (for over
fitting models) and bias (for under fitting models). A linear model is
typically low-variance and high-bias.
page 536:
- // can be used instead of gradient descent.
page 538:
-
One of the advantages of using the normal equation is that you do not need to
worry about feature scaling.
-
Another advantage of the normal equation is that you do not need to choose
the learning rate.
-
The normal equation has its own particular disadvantages; foremost is that it
does not scale as well when we have data with a large number of features. We
need to calculate the inverse of the transpose of our feature matrix, X. This
calculation results in an n by n matrix. Remember that n is the number of
features. This actually means that on most platforms the time it takes to
invert a matrix grows, approximately, as a cube of n. So, for data with a large
number of features, say greater than 10,000, you should probably consider using
gradient descent rather than the normal equation. Another problem that arises
when using the normal equation is that, when we have more features than
training data, that is, when n is greater than m, the normal equation without
regularization will not work. This is because the matrix, XTX, is
non-transposable, and so there is no way to calculate our term, (XTX)^-1.
page 544:
-
In the one versus all approach, [to multiclass classification] a single multiclass problem
is transformed into a number of binary classification problems. This is called
the one versus all technique because we take each class in turn and fit a
hypothesis function for that particular class, assigning a negative class to
the other classes. We end up with different classifiers, each of which is
trained to recognize one of the classes.
-
With another approach called the one versus
one method, a classifier is constructed for each pair of classes. When
the model makes a prediction, the class that receives the most votes wins.
-
Sklearn implements the one versus all algorithm using the OneVsRestClassifier /span> class and the one versus one
algorithm with OneVsOneClassifier.
page 545:
- We mentioned earlier that linear regression can become unstable, that is,
highly sensitive to small changes in the training data, if features are
correlated. Consider the extreme case where two features are perfectly
negatively correlated such that any increase in one feature is accompanied by
an equivalent decrease in another feature. When we apply our linear regression
algorithm to just these two features, it will result in a function that is
constant, so this is not really telling us anything about the data.
Alternatively, if the features are positively correlated, small changes in them
will be amplified. Regularization helps moderate
this.
page 546:
page 547:
- Ridge regression is sometimes referred to as
using the L2 norm, and lasso regularization, the L1 norm.
page 549:
- // Nice chapter, describes the algorithms well.
page 551:
page 569:
- The right features, sometimes called attributes, are the central component
for machine learning models. A sophisticated model with the wrong features is
worthless.
page 570:
page 582:
- fill in the missing values through a process of imputation. For classification, we can simply use the
statistics of the mean, median, and mode over the observed features to impute
the missing values.
- Many machine learning algorithms require that
features are standardized. This means that they will work best when the
individual features look more or less like normally distributed data with
near-zero mean and unit variance. The easiest way to do this is by subtracting
the mean value from each feature and scaling it by dividing by the standard
deviation. This can be achieved by the scale() function
or the standardScaler() function in the sklearn.preprocessing()
function. Although these functions will accept sparse data, they probably
should not be used in such situations because centering sparse data would
likely destroy its structure. It is recommended to use the MacAbsScaler() or
maxabs_scale() function in these cases. The former scales and translates each
feature individually by its maximum absolute value. The latter scales each
feature individually to a range of [-1,1]. Another specific case is when we
have outliers in the data. In these cases using the robust_scale() or
RobustScaler() function is recommended.
page 589:
-
Tree-based models are particularly well suited to ensembles, primarily
because they can be sensitive to changes in the training data.
-
builds each tree using a different random subset of the features and is
therefore called a random forest.
page 601:
-
Generally, in classification tasks, there are three
reasons why a model may misclassify a test instance. Firstly, it may simply be
unavoidable if features from different classes are described by the same
feature vectors. In probabilistic models, this happens when the class
distributions overlap so that an instance has non-zero likelihoods for several
classes. Here we can only approximate a target hypothesis.
-
The second reason for classification errors is
that the model does not have the expressive capabilities to fully represent the
target hypothesis. For example, even the best linear classifier will
misclassify instances if the data is not linearly separable. This is due to the bias of the classifier. Although there
is no single agreed way to measure bias, we can see that a nonlinear decision
boundary will have less bias than a linear one, or that more complex decision
boundaries will have less bias than simpler ones. We can also see that tree
models have the least bias because they can continue to branch until only a
single instance is covered by each leaf.
page 602:
- Now, it may seem that we should attempt to minimize bias; however, in most
cases, lowering the bias tends to increase the variance and vice versa. Variance, as you have probably guessed, is the third source
of classification errors. High variance models are highly dependent on
training data. The nearest neighbor's classifier, for example, segments the
instance space into single training points. If a training point near the
decision boundary is moved, then that boundary will change. Tree models are
also high variance, but for a different reason. Consider that we change the
training data in such a way that a different feature is selected at the root of
the tree. This will likely result in the rest of the tree being different.
-
Bagging is primarily a variance reduction technique
and boosting is primarily a bias reduction technique.
-
Bagging ensembles work most effectively with high variance models, such as
complex trees, whereas boosting is typically used with high bias models such as
linear classifiers.
page 605:
-
The importance of defining a scoring strategy should not be underestimated,
and in Sklearn, there are basically three approaches:
-
Estimator score: This refers to using the
estimator's inbuilt score() method, specific to each estimator
-
Scoring parameters: This refers to
cross-validation tools relying on an internal scoring strategy
-
Metric functions: These are implemented in the
metrics module
page 606:
- A better way to measure performance is using by precision, (P) and Recall, (R). If you remember from
the table in Chapter 4, Models – Learning from Information, precision, or
specificity, is the proportion of predicted positive instances that are
correct, that is, TP/(TP+FP). Recall, or sensitivity, is TP/(TP+FN). The
F-measure is defined as 2RP/ (R+P). These measures ignore the true negative
rate, and so they are not making an evaluation on how well a model handles
negative cases.
page 612:
-
Grid search is probably the most used method of
optimization hyper parameters, however, there are times when it may not
be the best choice. The RandomizedSearchCV
object implements a randomized search over possible parameters. It uses a
dictionary similar to the GridSearchCV object, however, for each parameter, a
distribution can be set, over which a random search of values will be made. If
the dictionary contains a list of values, then these will be sampled uniformly.
Additionally, the RandomizedSearchCV object also contains an n_iter parameter
that is effectively a computational budget of the number of parameter settings
sampled. It defaults to 10, and at high values, will generally give better
results. However, this is at the expense of runtime.
-
There are alternatives to the brute force approach of the grid search, and
these are provided in estimators such as LassoCV and
ElasticNetCV. Here, the estimator itself optimizes its regularization parameter
by fitting it along a regularization, path. This is usually more efficient than
using a grid search.
Module 3: Advanced Machine Learning with Python
page 631:
- Unsupervised learning techniques are a valuable set of tools for exploratory
analysis.
page 634:
- In summary, the covariance matrix is used to calculate Eigenvectors. An
orthonormalization process is undertaken that produces orthogonal, normalized
vectors from the Eigenvectors. The eigenvector with the greatest eigenvalue is
the first principal component with successive components having smaller
eigenvalues. In this way, the PCA [Principle Component Analysis] algorithm has the effect of
taking a dataset and transforming it into a new, lower-dimensional coordinate
system.
page 641:
page 658:
- The RBM [Restricted Boltzmann Machine] is a form of
recurrent neural network.
page 660:
page 661:
-
This topology makes Boltzmann machines stochastic—probabilistic rather than
deterministic
-
[RBM] is an energy-based model, which means that it uses an energy function
to associate an energy value with each configuration of the network.
page 664:
page 679:
-
The RBM is most commonly used as a pretraining mechanism for a highly
effective deep network architecture called a DBN [deep
belief networks]. DBNs are extremely powerful tools to learn and
classify a range of image datasets. They possess a very good ability to
generalize to unknown cases and are among the best image-learning tools
available.
-
it has been noted that even if the layers don't contain very many nodes, with
enough layers, more or less any function can be modeled.
page 688:
- An autoencoder is a simple three-layer neural network whose output units are
directly connected back to the input units. The objective of the autoencoder is
to encode the i-dimensional input into an h-dimensional representation, where h
< i, before reconstructing (decoding) the input at the output layer. The
training process involves iteration over this process until the reconstruction
error is minimized
page 689:
page 691;
- a denoising autoencoder can work effectively with minimal preprocessing.
page 708:
-
The design of convolutional neural networks takes inspiration from the visual
cortex
-
Google's DeepDream program, which became well-known for its overtrained,
hallucinogenic imagery, also uses a convolutional neural network.
-
Facebook uses convolutional nets in face verification (DeepFace).
page 709:
- Perhaps the most immediate difference between a convolutional neural network
and most other networks is that all of the neurons in a
convnet are identical! All neurons possess the same parameters and
weight values. As you can see, this will immediately reduce the number of
parameter values controlled by the network, bringing substantial efficiency
savings. It also typically improves network learning rate as there are fewer
free parameters to be managed and computed over.
page 712:
page 720:
- GoogLeNet was designed to tackle computer vision challenges involving
Internet-quality image data, that is, images that have been captured in real
contexts where the pose, lighting, occlusion, and clutter of images vary
significantly. GoogLeNet was applied to the 2014
ImageNet challenge with noteworthy success, achieving only 6.7% error rate on
the test dataset. ImageNet images are small, high-granularity images
taken from many, varied classes.
page 759:
- "The features you use influence more than everything else the result. No
algorithm alone, to my knowledge, can supplement the information gain given by
correct feature engineering." -(Luca Massaron)
page 769:
page 770:
page 798:
- there is a specific multicollinearity test that's worth considering; namely,
inspecting the eigenvalues of our data's correlation matrix.
page 805:
- Deep learning algorithms tend to perform better on less-engineered data than
shallower models and it might be that less work is needed to improve results.
page 862:
- typical goal in applied machine learning contexts is to reduce the factor of
training time to data change frequency to the smallest value possible.
page 866:
- Lasagne was created, to call Theano functions
and return Theano expressions or numpy data types, in a much less complex and
more easily understood manner than the same operations written in native Theano
code.
page 869: