Book Image

Python Machine Learning

By : Sebastian Raschka
Book Image

Python Machine Learning

By: Sebastian Raschka

Overview of this book

Machine learning and predictive analytics are transforming the way businesses and other organizations operate. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success, becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. Python can help you deliver key insights into your data – its unique capabilities as a language let you build sophisticated algorithms and statistical models that can reveal new perspectives and answer key questions that are vital for success. Python Machine Learning gives you access to the world of predictive analytics and demonstrates why Python is one of the world’s leading data science languages. If you want to ask better questions of data, or need to improve and extend the capabilities of your machine learning systems, this practical data science book is invaluable. Covering a wide range of powerful Python libraries, including scikit-learn, Theano, and Keras, and featuring guidance and tips on everything from sentiment analysis to neural networks, you’ll soon be able to answer some of the most important questions facing you and your organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
14
Index

A few last words about neural network implementation


You might be wondering why we went through all of this theory just to implement a simple multi-layer artificial network that can classify handwritten digits instead of using an open source Python machine learning library. One reason is that at the time of writing this book, scikit-learn does not have an MLP implementation. More importantly, we (machine learning practitioners) should have at least a basic understanding of the algorithms that we are using in order to apply machine learning techniques appropriately and successfully.

Now that we know how feedforward neural networks work, we are ready to explore more sophisticated Python libraries built on top of NumPy such as Theano http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/), which allows us to construct neural networks more efficiently. We will see this in Chapter 13, Parallelizing Neural Network Training with Theano. Over the last couple of years, Theano has gained a lot of popularity among...