Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

By : Andrich van Wyk
3 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

3 (1)
By: Andrich van Wyk

Overview of this book

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python is a comprehensive guide to learning the basics of machine learning and progressing to building scalable machine learning systems that are ready for release. This book will get you acquainted with the high-performance gradient-boosting LightGBM framework and show you how it can be used to solve various machine-learning problems to produce highly accurate, robust, and predictive solutions. Starting with simple machine learning models in scikit-learn, you’ll explore the intricacies of gradient boosting machines and LightGBM. You’ll be guided through various case studies to better understand the data science processes and learn how to practically apply your skills to real-world problems. As you progress, you’ll elevate your software engineering skills by learning how to build and integrate scalable machine-learning pipelines to process data, train models, and deploy them to serve secure APIs using Python tools such as FastAPI. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to use various -of-the-art tools that will help you build production-ready systems, including FLAML for AutoML, PostgresML for operating ML pipelines using Postgres, high-performance distributed training and serving via Dask, and creating and running models in the Cloud with AWS Sagemaker.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Gradient Boosting and LightGBM Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Practical Machine Learning with LightGBM
10
Part 3: Production-ready Machine Learning with LightGBM

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced machine learning as a method of creating software by learning to perform a task from a corpus of data instead of relying on programming the instructions by hand. We introduced the core concepts of machine learning with a focus on supervised learning and illustrated their applications through examples with scikit-learn.

We also introduced decision trees as a machine learning algorithm and discussed their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how to control overfitting using hyperparameters. We concluded this chapter with examples of how to solve classification and regression problems using decision trees in scikit-learn.

This chapter has given us a foundational understanding of machine learning, enabling us to dive deeper into the data science process and the LightGBM library.

The next chapter will focus on ensemble learning in decision trees, a technique where the predictions of multiple decision trees are combined to improve the overall performance. Boosting, particularly gradient boosting, will be covered in detail.