Gradient boosting is an ensemble of decision trees algorithms. It may be one of the most popular techniques for structured (tabular) classification and regression predictive modeling problems given that it performs so well across a wide range of datasets in practice. A major problem of gradient boosting is that it is slow to train the […]
Typically, a simpler and better-performing machine learning model can be developed by removing input features (columns) from the training dataset. This is called feature selection and there are many different types of algorithms that can be used. It is possible to frame the problem of feature selection as an optimization problem. In the case that […]
Optimization is the problem of finding a set of inputs to an objective function that results in a maximum or minimum function evaluation. It is the challenging problem that underlies many machine learning algorithms, from fitting logistic regression models to training artificial neural networks. There are perhaps hundreds of popular optimization algorithms, and perhaps tens […]
Occam’s razor suggests that in machine learning, we should prefer simpler models with fewer coefficients over complex models like ensembles. Taken at face value, the razor is a heuristic that suggests more complex hypotheses make more assumptions that, in turn, will make them too narrow and not generalize well. In machine learning, it suggests complex […]
Meta-learning in machine learning refers to learning algorithms that learn from other learning algorithms. Most commonly, this means the use of machine learning algorithms that learn how to best combine the predictions from other machine learning algorithms in the field of ensemble learning. Nevertheless, meta-learning might also refer to the manual process of model selecting […]
Knowledge of calculus is not required to get results and solve problems in machine learning or deep learning. However, knowing some calculus will help you in a number of ways, such as in reading mathematical notation in books and papers, and in understanding the terms used to describe fitting models like “gradient,” and in understanding […]
Dynamic classifier selection is a type of ensemble learning algorithm for classification predictive modeling. The technique involves fitting multiple machine learning models on the training dataset, then selecting the model that is expected to perform best when making a prediction, based on the specific details of the example to be predicted. This can be achieved […]
The Perceptron is a linear machine learning algorithm for binary classification tasks. It may be considered one of the first and one of the simplest types of artificial neural networks. It is definitely not “deep” learning but is an important building block. Like logistic regression, it can quickly learn a linear separation in feature space […]
Autoencoder is a type of neural network that can be used to learn a compressed representation of raw data. An autoencoder is composed of encoder and a decoder sub-models. The encoder compresses the input and the decoder attempts to recreate the input from the compressed version provided by the encoder. After training, the encoder model […]
Autoencoder is a type of neural network that can be used to learn a compressed representation of raw data. An autoencoder is composed of an encoder and a decoder sub-models. The encoder compresses the input and the decoder attempts to recreate the input from the compressed version provided by the encoder. After training, the encoder […]
