Supervised Learning with scikit-learn

Machine learning is the field that teaches machines and computers to learn from existing data to make predictions on new data: Will a tumor be benign or malignant? Which of your customers will take their business elsewhere? Is a particular email spam? In this course, you'll learn how to use Python to perform supervised learning, an essential component of machine learning. You'll learn how to build predictive models, tune their parameters, and determine how well they will perform with unseen data—all while using real world datasets. You'll be using scikit-learn, one of the most popular and user-friendly machine learning libraries for Python.

1. Classification

In this chapter, you will be introduced to classification problems and learn how to solve them using supervised learning techniques. And you’ll apply what you learn to a political dataset, where you classify the party affiliation of United States congressmen based on their voting records.

2. Regression

In the previous chapter, you used image and political datasets to predict binary and multiclass outcomes. But what if your problem requires a continuous outcome? Regression is best suited to solving such problems. You will learn about fundamental concepts in regression and apply them to predict the life expectancy in a given country using Gapminder data.

3. Fine-tuning your model

Having trained your model, your next task is to evaluate its performance. In this chapter, you will learn about some of the other metrics available in scikit-learn that will allow you to assess your model's performance in a more nuanced manner. Next, learn to optimize your classification and regression models using hyperparameter tuning.

4. Preprocessing and pipelines

This chapter introduces pipelines, and how scikit-learn allows for transformers and estimators to be chained together and used as a single unit. Preprocessing techniques will be introduced as a way to enhance model performance, and pipelines will tie together concepts from previous chapters.