Book Image

Python Machine Learning by Example - Third Edition

By : Yuxi (Hayden) Liu
Book Image

Python Machine Learning by Example - Third Edition

By: Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Overview of this book

Python Machine Learning By Example, Third Edition serves as a comprehensive gateway into the world of machine learning (ML). With six new chapters, on topics including movie recommendation engine development with Naïve Bayes, recognizing faces with support vector machine, predicting stock prices with artificial neural networks, categorizing images of clothing with convolutional neural networks, predicting with sequences using recurring neural networks, and leveraging reinforcement learning for making decisions, the book has been considerably updated for the latest enterprise requirements. At the same time, this book provides actionable insights on the key fundamentals of ML with Python programming. Hayden applies his expertise to demonstrate implementations of algorithms in Python, both from scratch and with libraries. Each chapter walks through an industry-adopted application. With the help of realistic examples, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics of ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, classification, regression, clustering, and NLP. By the end of this ML Python book, you will have gained a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed in the best practices of applying ML techniques to solve problems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Predicting Online Ad Click-Through with Tree-Based Algorithms

We built a face image classifier in the previous chapter. In this chapter and the next, we will be solving one of the most data-driven problems in digital advertising: ad click-through prediction—given a user and the page they are visiting, this predicts how likely it is that they will click on a given ad. We will focus on learning tree-based algorithms (including decision tree, random forest, and boosted trees) and utilize them to tackle this billion-dollar problem. We will be exploring decision trees from the root to the leaves, as well as the aggregated version, a forest of trees. This won't be a theory-only chapter, as there are a lot of hand calculations and implementations of tree models from scratch included. We will be using scikit-learn and XGBoost, a popular Python package for tree-based algorithms.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Two types of features:...