This chapter has been a quick tour of machine learning in Python, primarily using the tools within the Scikit-Learn library. As long as the chapter

This chapter has explored a number of the central concepts and algorithms of machine learning. But moving from these concepts to real-world application can be

In the previous section we covered Gaussian mixture models (GMM), which are a kind of hybrid between a clustering estimator and a density estimator. Recall

The k-means clustering model explored in the previous section is simple and relatively easy to understand, but its simplicity leads to practical challenges in its application.

We have seen how principal component analysis (PCA) can be used in the dimensionality reduction task—reducing the number of features of a dataset while maintaining

Up until now, we have been looking in depth at supervised learning estimators: those estimators that predict labels based on labeled training data. Here we

Previously we have looked in depth at a simple generative classifier (naive Bayes; see In Depth: Naive Bayes Classification) and a powerful discriminative classifier (support vector

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a particularly powerful and flexible class of supervised algorithms for both classification and regression. In this section, we will develop

Just as naive Bayes (discussed earlier in In Depth: Naive Bayes Classification) is a good starting point for classification tasks, linear regression models are a good

The previous four sections have given a general overview of the concepts of machine learning. In this section and the ones that follow, we will

The previous sections outline the fundamental ideas of machine learning, but all of the examples assume that you have numerical data in a tidy, [n_samples, n_features] format.

In the previous section, we saw the basic recipe for applying a supervised machine learning model: Choose a class of model Choose model hyperparameters Fit

There are several Python libraries which provide solid implementations of a range of machine learning algorithms. One of the best known is Scikit-Learn, a package that

Before we take a look at the details of various machine learning methods, let’s start by looking at what machine learning is, and what it

Matplotlib Resources A single chapter in a book can never hope to cover all the available features and plot types available in Matplotlib. As with

atplotlib has proven to be an incredibly useful and popular visualization tool, but even avid users will admit it often leaves much to be desired.

Matplotlib was initially designed with only two-dimensional plotting in mind. Around the time of the 1.0 release, some three-dimensional plotting utilities were built on top

Matplotlib’s default plot settings are often the subject of complaint among its users. While much is slated to change in the 2.0 Matplotlib release in