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Data Preparation for Machine Learning

Data Preparation for Machine Learning

Data Cleaning, Feature Selection, and Data Transforms in Python

$37 USD

Data preparation involves transforming raw data in to a form that can be modeled using machine learning algorithms.

Cut through the equations, Greek letters, and confusion, and discover the specialized data preparation techniques that you need to know to get the most out of your data on your next project.

Using clear explanations, standard Python libraries, and step-by-step tutorial lessons, you will discover how to confidently and effectively prepare your data for predictive modeling with machine learning.

About this Ebook:

  • Read on all devices: English PDF format EBook, no DRM.
  • Tons of tutorials: 30 step-by-step lessons, 398 pages.
  • Foundations: intuitions, feature selection, scaling, more.
  • Working code: 168 Python (.py) code files included.

Clear, Complete End-to-End Examples.

Convinced?

Jump Straight to the Packages

David Lowe

The book is well-organized and covers a great variety of the data-prep challenges with clear explanations and easy-to-understand code for addressing those challenges. This book is now my primary, go-to reference for dealing with the data problems that can occur with my ML projects.

…so What is Data Preparation?

Predictive modeling projects involve learning from data.

Data refers to examples or cases from the domain that characterize the problem that you want to solve.

On a predictive modeling project, such as classification or regression, raw data typically cannot be used directly.

There are four main reasons why this is the case:

Data Types

Implementations of machine learning algorithms require data to be numeric.

Data Requirements

Some machine learning algorithms impose requirements on the data.

Data Errors

Statistical noise and errors in the data may need to be corrected.

Data Complexity

Complex nonlinear relationships may be teased out of the data.

As such, your raw data must be pre-processed prior to being used to fit and evaluate a machine learning model. This step in a predictive modeling project is referred to as “data preparation“.

We can define data preparation is the transformation of raw data into a form that is more suitable for modeling.

This is highly specific to your data, to the goals of your project and to the algorithms that will be used to model your data.

Standard Data Preparation Techniques

Nevertheless, there are common or standard tasks that you may use or explore during the data preparation step in a machine learning project.

These tasks include:

  • Data Cleaning: Identifying and correcting mistakes or errors in the data.
  • Feature Selection: Identifying those input variables that are most relevant to the task.
  • Data Transforms: Changing the scale or distribution of variables.
  • Feature Engineering: Deriving new variables from available data.
  • Dimensionality Reduction: Creating compact projections of the data.

Each of these tasks is a whole field of study with specialized algorithms.

Data preparation is not performed blindly.

In some cases, variables must be encoded or transformed before we can apply a machine learning algorithm, such as converting strings to numbers. In other cases, it is less clear, such as scaling a variable may or may not be useful to an algorithm.

Data Preparation is REALLY Important!

The broader philosophy of data preparation is to discover how to best expose the underlying structure of the problem to the learning algorithms. This is the guiding light.

We don’t know the underlying structure of the problem, if we did, we wouldn’t need a learning algorithm to discover it and learn how to make skillful predictions. Therefore exposing the unknown underlying structure of the problem is a process of discovery, along with discovering the well or best performing learning algorithms for the project.

It can be more complicated than it appears at first glance. For example, different input variables may require different data preparation methods. Further, different variables or subsets of input variables may require different sequences of data preparation methods.

It can feel overwhelming, given the large number of methods, each of which may have their own configuration and requirements. Nevertheless, the machine learning process steps before and after data preparation can help to inform what techniques to consider.

Data Preparation is one Step in a Systematic Process

Each machine learning project is different, because the specific data used in each project is different.

You may be the first person (ever!) to work on the specific predictive modeling problem.

Even though your project is unique, the steps on the path to a good or even the best result are generally the same from project to project. This is sometimes referred to as the “applied machine learning process“.

How do we know what data preparation techniques to use in our data?

On the surface, this is a challenging question, but if we look at the data preparation step in the context of the whole project, it becomes more straightforward. The steps in a predictive modeling project before and after the data preparation step that are important and inform the data preparation that is to be performed.

You job is to discover how to best expose the learning algorithms to the unknown underlying structure of your prediction problem. The path to get there is through data preparation.

In order for you to be an effective machine learning practitioner, you must know:

  • The different types of data preparation to consider on a project.
  • The top few algorithms for each class of data preparation technique.
  • When to use and how to configure top data preparation techniques.

This is often hard-earned knowledge, as there are few resources dedicated to the topic.

Introducing My New EBook:
Data Preparation for Machine Learning

Welcome to the EBook: Data Preparation for Machine Learning.

I designed this book to teach machine learning practitioners, like you, step-by-step how to configure and use the most important data preparation techniques with examples in Python.

This book was carefully designed to help you bring a wide variety of the tools and techniques of data preparation to your next project.

The tutorials were designed to teach you these techniques the fastest and most effective way that I know how: to learn by doing. With executable code that you can run to develop the intuitions required, and that you can copy-and-paste into your project and immediately get a result.

Data preparation is important to machine learning, and I believe that if it is taught at the right level for practitioners, it can be a fascinating, fun, directly applicable, and immeasurably useful toolbox of techniques.

I hope that you agree.

Convinced?
Click to jump straight to the packages.

…so, is this book right for YOU?
Who Is This Book For?

Let’s make sure you are in the right place.

This book is for developers that may know some applied machine learning. Maybe you know how to work through a predictive modeling problem end-to-end, or at least most of the main steps, with popular tools.

This guide was written in the top-down and results-first machine learning style that you’re used to from Machine Learning Mastery.

The lessons in this book do assume a few things about you, such as:

You need to know:

  • You know your way around basic Python for programming.
  • You may know some basic NumPy for array manipulation.
  • You may know some basic scikit-learn for modeling.

You do NOT need to be:

  • You do not need to be a math wiz!
  • You do not need to be a master programmer!
  • You do not need to be a machine learning expert!

About Your Outcomes
…so what will YOU know after reading this book?

After reading and working through this book, you will know:

  • The importance of data preparation for predictive modeling machine learning projects.
  • How to prepare data in a way that avoids data leakage and in turn incorrect model evaluation.
  • How to identify and handle problems with messy data such as outliers and missing values.
  • How to identify and remove irrelevant and redundant input variables with feature selection methods.
  • How to know which feature selection method to choose based on the data types of the variables.

  • How to scale the range of input variables using normalization and standardization techniques.
  • How to encode categorical variables as numbers and numeric variables as categories.
  • How to transform the probability distribution of input variables.
  • How to transform for dataset with different variable types and how to transform target variables.
  • How to project variables into a lower-dimensional space that captures the salient data relationships.

But, what if…?

Do you have some doubts? Let me see if I can help.

What if I Am New to Machine Learning?

This book does not assume you have a background in machine learning.

That being said, I do recommend that you learn how to work through a predictive modeling problem first. It will give you the context for the challenge of data preparation.

What if I Am Just a Developer?

Perfect. I wrote this book for you.

What if My Math is Really Poor?

Perfect. This book is for you.

No math is required, other than some basic arithmetic.

What if I Am Not a Python Programmer?

You can handle this book if you are a programmer in another language, even if you are not experienced in Python.

Everything is demonstrated with a small code example that you can run directly.

All code is provided for you to play with, modify, and learn from.

The book even has an appendix to show you how to set up Python on your workstation.

What if I Am Working Through another Machine Learning Course?

Excellent!

This book is not a substitute for an undergraduate course in machine learning or a textbook for such a course, although it is a great complement to such materials.

What Exactly Is In This Book?
…see the table of contents

This book was designed around major data preparation techniques that are directly relevant to real-world problems.

There are a lot of things you could learn about data preparation, from theory to abstract concepts to APIs. My goal is to take you straight to developing an intuition for the elements you must understand with laser-focused tutorials.

The tutorials were designed to focus on how to get results with data preparation methods. As such, the tutorials give you the tools to rapidly understand and apply each technique or operation. There is a mixture of both tutorial lessons mini-projects to both introduce the methods and give plenty of examples and opportunities to practice using them.

Each of the tutorials is designed to take you about one hour to read through and complete, excluding the extensions and further reading.

You can choose to work through the lessons one per day, one per week, or at your own pace. I think momentum is critically important, and this book is intended to be read and used, not to sit idle.

I recommend picking a schedule and sticking to it.

The tutorials are divided into 6 parts; they are:

  • Part 1: Foundation. Discover the importance of data preparation, tour data preparation techniques and discover the best practices to use in order to avoid data leakage.
  • Part 2: Data Cleaning. Discover how to transform messy data into clean by identifying outliers, and identifying and handling missing values with statistical and modeling techniques.
  • Part 3: Feature Selection. Discover statistical and modeling techniques for feature selection and feature importance and how to choose the technique to use for different variable types.
  • Part 4: Data Transforms. Discover how to transform variable types and variable probability distributions with a suite of standard data transform algorithms.
  • Part 5: Advanced Transforms. Discover how to handle some of the more tricky aspects of data transforms such as handling multiple variable types at once, transforming targets, and saving transforms after you choose a final model.
  • Part 6: Dimensionality Reduction. Discover how to remove input variables by projecting the data into a lower dimensional space with dimensionality reduction algorithms.

Lessons Overview

Below is an overview of the 30 step-by-step tutorial lessons you will work through:

Each lesson was designed to be completed in about 30-to-60 minutes by an average developer.

Part 1: Foundation

  • Lesson 01: Data Preparation in a Machine Learning Project
  • Lesson 02: Why Data Preparation is So Important
  • Lesson 03: Tour of Data Preparation Techniques
  • Lesson 04: Data Preparation Without Data Leakage

Part 2: Data Cleaning

  • Lesson 05: Basic Data Cleaning
  • Lesson 06: Outlier Identification and Removal
  • Lesson 07: Mark and Remove Missing Data
  • Lesson 08: How to Use Statistical Imputation
  • Lesson 09: How to Use kNN Imputation
  • Lesson 10: How to Use Iterative Imputation

Part 3: Feature Selection

  • Lesson 11: What is Feature Selection
  • Lesson 12: Feature Selection for Categorical Input
  • Lesson 13: Feature Selection for Numerical Input
  • Lesson 14: Feature Selection for Numerical Output
  • Lesson 15: RFE for Feature Selection
  • Lesson 16: Feature Importance

Part 4: Data Transforms

  • Lesson 17: Scale Numerical Data
  • Lesson 18: Robust Scaling Transform
  • Lesson 19: Encode Categorical Data
  • Lesson 20: Power Transform
  • Lesson 21: Quantile Transform
  • Lesson 22: Discretization Transform
  • Lesson 23: Polynomial Transform

Part 5: Advanced Transforms

  • Lesson 24: Transform Numerical and Categorical Data
  • Lesson 25: Transform the Target in Regression
  • Lesson 26: Save and Load Data Transforms

Part 6: Dimensionality Reduction

  • Lesson 27: What is Dimensionality Reduction
  • Lesson 28: LDA Dimensionality Reduction
  • Lesson 29: PCA Dimensionality Reduction
  • Lesson 30: SVD Dimensionality Reduction

Appendix

  • Appendix A: Getting help
  • Appendix B: How to Setup a Workstation for Python

You can see that each part targets a specific learning outcome, and so does each tutorial within each part. This acts as a filter to ensure you are only focused on the things you need to know to get to a specific result and do not get bogged down in the math or near-infinite number of digressions.

The tutorials were not designed to teach you everything there is to know about each of the theories or techniques. They were designed to give you an understanding of how they work, how to use them, and how to interpret the results the fastest way I know how: to learn by doing.

EBook Table of Contents

The screenshot below was taken from the PDF Ebook. It provides you a full overview of the table of contents from the book.

Data Preparation for Machine Learning Table of Contents

Data Preparation for Machine Learning Table of Contents

Here’s Everything You’ll Get…
in “Data Preparation for Machine Learning

A digital download that contains everything you need, including:

  • Clear descriptions to help you understand data preparation algorithms for applied machine learning.
  • Step-by-step Python tutorials to show you exactly how to apply each technique and algorithm.
  • End-to-end self-contained examples that give you everything you need in each tutorial without assuming prior knowledge.
  • Python source code recipes for every example in the book so that you can run the tutorial code in seconds.
  • Digital Ebook in PDF format so that you can have the book open side-by-side with the code and see exactly how each example works.

Resources you need to go deeper, when you need to, including:

  • The best sources of information on the Python ecosystem including the SciPy, NumPy, and scikit-learn libraries.
  • The best places online where you can ask your challenging questions and actually get a response.
  • The best books, and articles to learn more about each technique covered.

Background on the field of data preparation to give you the context you need, including:

  • How data preparation is the most important and most time consuming part of any machine learning project.
  • How raw data cannot be modeled directly with machine learning algorithm implementations.
  • How machine learning algorithms require input variables to all be numeric.
  • How some machine learning algorithms impose requirements on the data types, scale and probability distribution.
  • How a naive application of data preparation algorithms to data will result in data leakage.

Advanced techniques for handling data preparation transforms, including:

  • How to transform categorical and numerical input variables at the same time.
  • How to transform target variables for predictive modeling.
  • How to save and reuse data transforms on new data in the future.

Specialized feature selection algorithms designed to identify and remove input variables that are not required to predict the target variable, including:

  • How different statistical feature selection methods must be used depending on the input variable type.
  • How to apply feature selection to categorical input variables.
  • How to apply feature selection to numerical input variables.
  • How to apply feature selection on regression predictive modeling tasks.
  • How to use models to recursively identify and delete redundant input variables.
  • How to calculate the relative importance of input variables.

Specialized techniques to transform the scale, type and probability distribution of input variables.

  • How to scale numerical input variables to a new range using standardization and normalization.
  • How to scale numerical input variables that contain outlier values.
  • How to encode categorical variables using ordinal and one hot transforms.
  • How to shift variables with skewed probability distributions using power transforms.
  • How to change the probability distribution of variables using quantile transforms.
  • How to change numerical variables to ordinal or categorical variables using discretization.
  • How to add new input variables with polynomial feature engineering.

Specialized techniques for dimensionality reduction that can be used for data preparation, including:

  • How dimensionality reduction works by preserving salient relationships in data and projecting the data to a lower-dimensional space.
  • How to use linear discriminant analysis for dimensionality reduction.
  • How to use principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction.
  • How to use singular value decomposition for dimensionality reduction.

What More Do You Need?

Take a Sneak Peek Inside The EBook

Click an image to Enlarge.

BONUS: Data Preparation for Machine Learning Code Recipes
….you also get 168 fully working Python scripts

Sample Code Recipes

Each recipe presented in the book is standalone, meaning that you can copy and paste it into your project and use it immediately.

  • You get one Python script (.py) for each example provided in the book.

This means that you can follow along and compare your answers to a known working implementation of each example in the provided Python files.

This helps a lot to speed up your progress when working through the details of a specific task, such as:

  • Marking and removing outliers.
  • Marking and imputing missing data.
  • Selecting features on a dataset.
  • Calculating feature importance scores.
  • Scaling numerical data.
  • Encoding categorical data.
  • Transforming data probability distributions.
  • Transforming variable types.
  • Saving and reusing data preparation objects.
  • Projecting data into a lower dimensionality.

The provided code was developed in a text editor and is intended to be run on the command line. No special IDE or notebooks are required.

All code examples were designed and tested with Python 3.6+.

All code examples will run on modest and modern computer hardware and were executed on a CPU.

Python Technical Details

This section provides some technical details about the code provided with the book.

  • Python Version: You can use Python 3.6 or higher.
  • SciPy: You will use NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn APIs.
  • OS: You can use Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
  • Hardware: A standard modern workstation will do.
  • Editor: You can use a text editor and run the example from the command line.

Don’t have a Python environment?

No problem!

The appendix contains a step-by-step tutorial showing you exactly how to set up a Python machine learning environment.

Data Preparation for Machine Learning Bonus Code

Data Preparation for Machine Learning Bonus Code

About The Author

Jason BrownleeHi, I'm Jason Brownlee. I run this site and I wrote and published this book.

I live in Australia with my wife and sons. I love to read books, write tutorials, and develop systems.

I have a computer science and software engineering background as well as Masters and PhD degrees in Artificial Intelligence with a focus on stochastic optimization.

I've written books on algorithms, won and ranked well in competitions, consulted for startups, and spent years in industry. (Yes, I have spend a long time building and maintaining REAL operational systems!)

I get a lot of satisfaction helping developers get started and get really good at applied machine learning.

I teach an unconventional top-down and results-first approach to machine learning where we start by working through tutorials and problems, then later wade into theory as we need it.

I'm here to help if you ever have any questions. I want you to be awesome at machine learning.

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Check Out What Customers Are Saying:

Arek Bochnak

This book is fantastic – systemizing and giving you comprehensive knowledge of the data preparation with great examples and explanations – highly recommend !

Guy Koren

Very useful book ! Material is well organized and the examples are easy to follow and run. Most of all I like the references to the theoretical books s.t. I can get deeper understanding when necessary ! keep on the great work ! (I’m a frequent buyer of your books.)

James Travis Fowler

An excellent book on the key issues regarding Data Preparation, Feature Selection and other major issues. It provides great coding examples covering numerical and categorical input data preparation as well as handling numerical and categorical target variables and the modeling issues associated with these. The information will help greatly in handling all sorts of Machine Learning projects from start to finish. There is a lot to get through, but well worth the journey!

Maurizio Campolo

I consult him every time a doubt assails me. It has become one of my favorite manuals. Simple and well commented examples. Compliments.

Zachar Borsutsky

I think that the book is great! Very helpful in every project, very good written with many practical examples.

Sitthakarn Prasomsup

It’s great. I tried to use various methods to collect and sort data in order to be used in various projects. And this book can help me a lot.

Avatar

Although I regularly use some preparation techniques described in the book I think it is highly recommended to have a single reference with short and clear examples to refresh or some times discover a new technique that one is no aware of its existence.

From this point of view I think it is an essential reference text to have at hand.

Mark Chase

I find the book very helpful. I like the layout in that each chapter can stand alone. I also like the fact that there are code examples that show how not to do things as well as how to do things. I’m only about half-way through the book but find many things I need to add to a current model I’m developing.

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Your boss asks you:

Hey, can you build a predictive model for this?

Imagine you had the skills and confidence to say:
"YES!"
...and follow through.

I have been there. It feels great!

How much is that worth to you?

The industry is demanding skills in machine learning.
The market wants people that can deliver results, not write academic papers.

Business knows what these skills are worth and are paying sky-high starting salaries.

A Data Scientists Salary Begins at:
$100,000 to $150,000.
A Machine Learning Engineers Salary is Even Higher.

What Are Your Alternatives?

You made it this far.
You're ready to take action.

But, what are your alternatives? What options are there?

(1) A Theoretical Textbook for $100+ 
...it's boring, math-heavy and you'll probably never finish it.

(2) An On-site Boot Camp for $10,000+ 
...it's full of young kids, you must travel and it can take months.

(3) A Higher Degree for $100,000+ 
...it's expensive, takes years, and you'll be an academic.

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You think you have all the time in the world, but...

  • New methods are devised and algorithms change.
  • New books get released and prices increase.
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Right Now is the Best Time to make your start.

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This is by design and I put a lot of thought into it. My rationale is as follows:

  • I use LaTeX to layout the text and code to give a professional look and I am afraid that EBook readers would mess this up.
  • The increase in supported formats would create a maintenance headache that would take a large amount of time away from updating the books and working on new books.
  • Most critically, reading on an e-reader or iPad is antithetical to the book-open-next-to-code-editor approach the PDF format was chosen to support.

My materials are playbooks intended to be open on the computer, next to a text editor and a command line.

They are not textbooks to be read away from the computer.

Sorry, all of my books are self-published and do not have ISBNs.

Thanks for your interest in my books

I’m sorry that you cannot afford my books or purchase them in your country.

I don’t give away free copies of my books.

I do give away a lot of free material on applied machine learning already.

You can access the best free material here:

Maybe.

I offer a discount on my books to:

  • Students
  • Teachers
  • Retirees

If you fall into one of these groups and would like a discount, please contact me and ask.

Sorry, the books and bundles are for individual purchase only.

I do not respond to RFIs or similar.

Maybe.

I support payment via PayPal and Credit Card.

You may be able to set up a PayPal account that accesses your debit card. I recommend contacting PayPal or reading their documentation.

Sorry no.

I do not support WeChat Pay or Alipay at this stage.

I only support payment via PayPal and Credit Card.

Yes, you can print the purchased PDF books for your own personal interest.

There is no digital rights management (DRM) on the PDFs to prevent you from printing them.

Please do not distribute printed copies of your purchased books.

You can review the table of contents for any book.

I provide two copies of the table of contents for each book on the book’s page.

Specifically:

  1. A written summary that lists the tutorials/lessons in the book and their order.
  2. A screenshot of the table of contents taken from the PDF.

If you are having trouble finding the table of contents, search the page for the section titled “Table of Contents”.

No.

I only support payment via PayPal or Credit Card.

Yes.

If you purchase a book or bundle and later decide that you want to upgrade to the super bundle, I can arrange it for you.

Contact me and let me know that you would like to upgrade and what books or bundles you have already purchased and which email address you used to make the purchases.

I will create a special offer code that you can use to get the price of books and bundles purchased so far deducted from the price of the super bundle.

I am happy for you to use parts of my material in the development of your own course material, such as lecture slides for an in person class or homework exercises.

I am not happy if you share my material for free or use it verbatim. This would be copyright infringement.

All code on my site and in my books was developed and provided for educational purposes only. I take no responsibility for the code, what it might do, or how you might use it.

If you use my material to teach, please reference the source, including:

  • The Name of the author, e.g. “Jason Brownlee”.
  • The Title of the tutorial or book.
  • The Name of the website, e.g. “Machine Learning Mastery”.
  • The URL of the tutorial or book.
  • The Date you accessed or copied the code.

For example:

  • Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Algorithms in Python, Machine Learning Mastery, Available from https://machinelearningmastery.com/machine-learning-with-python/, accessed April 15th, 2018.

Also, if your work is public, contact me, I’d love to see it out of general interest.

Thanks for asking.

Sorry, no.

I prefer to keep complete control over my content for now.

Sorry no.

My books are self-published and are only available from my website.

Generally no.

I don’t have exercises or assignments in my books.

I do have end-to-end projects in some of the books, but they are in a tutorial format where I lead you through each step.

The book chapters are written as self-contained tutorials with a specific learning outcome. You will learn how to do something at the end of the tutorial.

Some books have a section titled “Extensions” with ideas for how to modify the code in the tutorial in some advanced ways. They are like self-study exercises.

Sorry, I do not offer a certificate of completion for my books or my email courses.

Sorry, new books are not included in your super bundle.

I release new books every few months and develop a new super bundle at those times.

All existing customers will get early access to new books at a discount price.

Note, that you do get free updates to all of the books in your super bundle. This includes bug fixes, changes to APIs and even new chapters sometimes. I send out an email to customers for major book updates or you can contact me any time and ask for the latest version of a book.

No.

I have books that do not require any skill in programming, for example:

Other books do have code examples in a given programming language.

You must know the basics of the programming language, such as how to install the environment and how to write simple programs. I do not teach programming, I teach machine learning for developers.

You do not need to be a good programmer.

That being said, I do offer tutorials on how to setup your environment efficiently and even crash courses on programming languages for developers that may not be familiar with the given language.

No.

My books do not cover the theory or derivations of machine learning methods.

This is by design.

My books are focused on the practical concern of applied machine learning. Specifically, how algorithms work and how to use them effectively with modern open source tools.

If you are interested in the theory and derivations of equations, I recommend a machine learning textbook. Some good examples of machine learning textbooks that cover theory include:

I generally don’t run sales.

If I do have a special, such as around the launch of a new book, I only offer it to past customers and subscribers on my email list.

I do offer book bundles that offer a discount for a collection of related books.

I do offer a discount to students, teachers, and retirees. Contact me to find out about discounts.

Sorry, I don’t have videos.

I only have tutorial lessons and projects in text format.

This is by design. I used to have video content and I found the completion rate much lower.

I want you to put the material into practice. I have found that text-based tutorials are the best way of achieving this. With text-based tutorials you must read, implement and run the code.

With videos, you are passively watching and not required to take any action. Videos are entertainment or infotainment instead of productive learning and work.

After reading and working through the tutorials you are far more likely to use what you have learned.

Yes, I offer a 90-day no questions asked money-back guarantee.

I stand behind my books. They contain my best knowledge on a specific machine learning topic, and each book as been read, tested and used by tens of thousands of readers.

Nevertheless, if you find that one of my Ebooks is a bad fit for you, I will issue a full refund.

There are no physical books, therefore no shipping is required.

All books are EBooks that you can download immediately after you complete your purchase.

I support purchases from any country via PayPal or Credit Card.

Yes.

I recommend using standalone Keras version 2.4 (or higher) running on top of TensorFlow version 2.2 (or higher).

All tutorials on the blog have been updated to use standalone Keras running on top of Tensorflow 2.

All books have been updated to use this same combination.

I do not recommend using Keras as part of TensorFlow 2 yet (e.g. tf.keras). It is too new, new things have issues, and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Standalone Keras has been working for years and continues to work extremely well.

There is one case of tutorials that do not support TensorFlow 2 because the tutorials make use of third-party libraries that have not yet been updated to support TensorFlow 2. Specifically tutorials that use Mask-RCNN for object recognition. Once the third party library has been updated, these tutorials too will be updated.

The book “Long Short-Term Memory Networks with Python” is not focused on time series forecasting, instead, it is focused on the LSTM method for a suite of sequence prediction problems.

The book “Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting” shows you how to develop MLP, CNN and LSTM models for univariate, multivariate and multi-step time series forecasting problems.

Mini-courses are free courses offered on a range of machine learning topics and made available via email, PDF and blog posts.

Mini-courses are:

  • Short, typically 7 days or 14 days in length.
  • Terse, typically giving one tip or code snippet per lesson.
  • Limited, typically narrow in scope to a few related areas.

Ebooks are provided on many of the same topics providing full training courses on the topics.

Ebooks are:

  • Longer, typically 25+ complete tutorial lessons, each taking up to an hour to complete.
  • Complete, providing a gentle introduction into each lesson and includes full working code and further reading.
  • Broad, covering all of the topics required on the topic to get productive quickly and bring the techniques to your own projects.

The mini-courses are designed for you to get a quick result. If you would like more information or fuller code examples on the topic then you can purchase the related Ebook.

The book “Master Machine Learning Algorithms” is for programmers and non-programmers alike. It teaches you how 10 top machine learning algorithms work, with worked examples in arithmetic, and spreadsheets, not code. The focus is on an understanding on how each model learns and makes predictions.

The book “Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch” is for programmers that learn by writing code to understand. It provides step-by-step tutorials on how to implement top algorithms as well as how to load data, evaluate models and more. It has less on how the algorithms work, instead focusing exclusively on how to implement each in code.

The two books can support each other.

The books are a concentrated and more convenient version of what I put on the blog.

I design my books to be a combination of lessons and projects to teach you how to use a specific machine learning tool or library and then apply it to real predictive modeling problems.

The books get updated with bug fixes, updates for API changes and the addition of new chapters, and these updates are totally free.

I do put some of the book chapters on the blog as examples, but they are not tied to the surrounding chapters or the narrative that a book offers and do not offer the standalone code files.

With each book, you also get all of the source code files used in the book that you can use as recipes to jump-start your own predictive modeling problems.

My books are playbooks. Not textbooks.

They have no deep explanations of theory, just working examples that are laser-focused on the information that you need to know to bring machine learning to your project.

There is little math, no theory or derivations.

My readers really appreciate the top-down, rather than bottom-up approach used in my material. It is the one aspect I get the most feedback about.

My books are not for everyone, they are carefully designed for practitioners that need to get results, fast.

A code file is provided for each example presented in the book.

Dataset files used in each chapter are also provided with the book.

The code and dataset files are provided as part of your .zip download in a code/ subdirectory. Code and datasets are organized into subdirectories, one for each chapter that has a code example.

If you have misplaced your .zip download, you can contact me and I can send an updated purchase receipt email with a link to download your package.

Ebooks can be purchased from my website directly.

  1. First, find the book or bundle that you wish to purchase, you can see the full catalog here:
    1. Machine Learning Mastery Books
  2. Click on the book or bundle that you would like to purchase to go to the book’s details page.
  3. Click the “Buy Now” button for the book or bundle to go to the shopping cart page.
  4. Fill in the shopping cart with your details and payment details, and click the “Place Order” button.
  5. After completing the purchase you will be emailed a link to download your book or bundle.

All prices are in US dollars (USD).

Books can be purchased with PayPal or Credit Card.

All prices on Machine Learning Mastery are in US dollars.

Payments can be made by using either PayPal or a Credit Card that supports international payments (e.g. most credit cards).

You do not have to explicitly convert money from your currency to US dollars.

Currency conversion is performed automatically when you make a payment using PayPal or Credit Card.

After filling out and submitting your order form, you will be able to download your purchase immediately.

Your web browser will be redirected to a webpage where you can download your purchase.

You will also receive an email with a link to download your purchase.

If you lose the email or the link in the email expires, contact me and I will resend the purchase receipt email with an updated download link.

After you complete your purchase you will receive an email with a link to download your bundle.

The download will include the book or books and any bonus material.

To use a discount code, also called an offer code, or discount coupon when making a purchase, follow these steps:

1. Enter the discount code text into the field named “Discount Coupon” on the checkout page.

 

Note, if you don’t see a field called “Discount Coupon” on the checkout page, it means that that product does not support discounts.

2. Click the “Apply” button.

3. You will then see a message that the discount was applied successfully to your order.

 

 

Note, if the discount code that you used is no longer valid, you will see a message that the discount was not successfully applied to your order.

 

There are no physical books, therefore no shipping is required.

All books are EBooks that you can download immediately after you complete your purchase.

I recommend reading one chapter per day.

Momentum is important.

Some readers finish a book in a weekend.

Most readers finish a book in a few weeks by working through it during nights and weekends.

You will get your book immediately.

After you complete and submit the payment form, you will be immediately redirected to a webpage with a link to download your purchase.

You will also immediately be sent an email with a link to download your purchase.

What order should you read the books?

That is a great question, my best suggestions are as follows:

  • Consider starting with a book on a topic that you are most excited about.
  • Consider starting with a book on a topic that you can apply on a project immediately.

Also, consider that you don’t need to read all of the books, perhaps a subset of the books will get you the skills you need or want.

Nevertheless, one suggested order for reading the books is as follows:

    1. Probability for Machine Learning
    2. Statistical Methods for Machine Learning
    3. Linear Algebra for Machine Learning
    4. Optimization for Machine Learning
    5. Calculus for Machine Learning
    6. The Beginner’s Guide to Data Science
    7. Master Machine Learning Algorithms
    8. Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch
    9. Python for Machine Learning
    10. Machine Learning Mastery With Weka
    11. Machine Learning Mastery With Python
    12. Machine Learning Mastery With R
    13. Data Preparation for Machine Learning
    14. Imbalanced Classification With Python
    15. Time Series Forecasting With Python
    16. Ensemble Learning Algorithms With Python
    17. XGBoost With Python
    18. Deep Learning With Python
    19. Deep Learning with PyTorch
    20. Long Short-Term Memory Networks with Python
    21. Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
    22. Deep Learning for Computer Vision
    23. Machine Learning in Open CV
    24. Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting
    25. Better Deep Learning
    26. Generative Adversarial Networks with Python
    27. Building Transformer Models with Attention
    28. Productivity with ChatGPT (this book can be read in any order)

I hope that helps.

Sorry, I do not have a license to purchase my books or bundles for libraries.

The books are for individual use only.

Generally, no.

Multi-seat licenses create a bit of a maintenance nightmare for me, sorry. It takes time away from reading, writing and helping my readers.

If you have a big order, such as for a class of students or a large team, please contact me and we will work something out.

I update the books frequently and you can access the latest version of a book at any time.

In order to get the latest version of a book, contact me directly with your order number or purchase email address and I can resend your purchase receipt email with an updated download link.

I do not maintain a public change log or errata for the changes in the book, sorry.

There are no physical books, therefore no delivery is required.

All books are Ebooks in PDF format that you can download immediately after you complete your purchase.

You will receive an email with a link to download your purchase. You can also contact me any time to get a new download link.

I support purchases from any country via PayPal or Credit Card.

My best advice is to start with a book on a topic that you can use immediately.

Baring that, pick a topic that interests you the most.

If you are unsure, perhaps try working through some of the free tutorials to see what area that you gravitate towards.

Generally, I recommend focusing on the process of working through a predictive modeling problem end-to-end:

I have three books that show you how to do this, with three top open source platforms:

These are great places to start.

You can always circle back and pick-up a book on algorithms later to learn more about how specific methods work in greater detail.

Thanks for your interest.

You can see the full catalog of my books and bundles here:

Thanks for asking.

I try not to plan my books too far into the future. I try to write about the topics that I am asked about the most or topics where I see the most misunderstanding.

If you would like me to write more about a topic, I would love to know.

Contact me directly and let me know the topic and even the types of tutorials you would love for me to write.

Contact me and let me know the email address (or email addresses) that you think you used to make purchases.

I can look up what purchases you have made and resend purchase receipts to you so that you can redownload your books and bundles.

All prices are in US Dollars (USD).

All currency conversion is handled by PayPal for PayPal purchases, or by Stripe and your bank for credit card purchases.

It is possible that your link to download your purchase will expire after a few days.

This is a security precaution.

Please contact me and I will resend you purchase receipt with an updated download link.

The book “Deep Learning With Python” could be a prerequisite to”Long Short-Term Memory Networks with Python“. It teaches you how to get started with Keras and how to develop your first MLP, CNN and LSTM.

The book “Long Short-Term Memory Networks with Python” goes deep on LSTMs and teaches you how to prepare data, how to develop a suite of different LSTM architectures, parameter tuning, updating models and more.

Both books focus on deep learning in Python using the Keras library.

The book “Long Short-Term Memory Networks in Python” focuses on how to develop a suite of different LSTM networks for sequence prediction, in general.

The book “Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting” focuses on how to use a suite of different deep learning models (MLPs, CNNs, LSTMs, and hybrids) to address a suite of different time series forecasting problems (univariate, multivariate, multistep and combinations).

The LSTM book teaches LSTMs only and does not focus on time series. The Deep Learning for Time Series book focuses on time series and teaches how to use many different models including LSTMs.

The book “Long Short-Term Memory Networks With Python” focuses on how to implement different types of LSTM models.

The book “Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing” focuses on how to use a variety of different networks (including LSTMs) for text prediction problems.

The LSTM book can support the NLP book, but it is not a prerequisite.

You may need a business or corporate tax number for “Machine Learning Mastery“, the company, for your own tax purposes. This is common in EU companies for example.

The Machine Learning Mastery company is operated out of Puerto Rico.

As such, the company does not have a VAT identification number for the EU or similar for your country or regional area.

The company does have a Company Number. The details are as follows:

  • Company Name: Zeus LLC
  • Company Number: 421867-1511

Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

There are no code examples in “Master Machine Learning Algorithms“, therefore no programming language is used.

Algorithms are described and their working is summarized using basic arithmetic. The algorithm behavior is also demonstrated in excel spreadsheets, that are available with the book.

It is a great book for learning how algorithms work, without getting side-tracked with theory or programming syntax.

If you are interested in learning about machine learning algorithms by coding them from scratch (using the Python programming language), I would recommend a different book:

I write the content for the books (words and code) using a text editor, specifically sublime.

I typeset the books and create a PDF using LaTeX.

All of the books have been tested and work with Python 3 (e.g. 3.5 or 3.6).

Most of the books have also been tested and work with Python 2.7.

Where possible, I recommend using the latest version of Python 3.

After you fill in the order form and submit it, two things will happen:

  1. You will be redirected to a webpage where you can download your purchase.
  2. You will be sent an email (to the email address used in the order form) with a link to download your purchase.

The redirect in the browser and the email will happen immediately after you complete the purchase.

You can download your purchase from either the webpage or the email.

If you cannot find the email, perhaps check other email folders, such as the “spam” folder?

If you have any concerns, contact me and I can resend your purchase receipt email with the download link.

I do test my tutorials and projects on the blog first. It’s like the early access to ideas, and many of them do not make it to my training.

Much of the material in the books appeared in some form on my blog first and is later refined, improved and repackaged into a chapter format. I find this helps greatly with quality and bug fixing.

The books provide a more convenient packaging of the material, including source code, datasets and PDF format. They also include updates for new APIs, new chapters, bug and typo fixing, and direct access to me for all the support and help I can provide.

I believe my books offer thousands of dollars of education for tens of dollars each.

They are months if not years of experience distilled into a few hundred pages of carefully crafted and well-tested tutorials.

I think they are a bargain for professional developers looking to rapidly build skills in applied machine learning or use machine learning on a project.

Also, what are skills in machine learning worth to you? to your next project? and you’re current or next employer?

Nevertheless, the price of my books may appear expensive if you are a student or if you are not used to the high salaries for developers in North America, Australia, UK and similar parts of the world. For that, I am sorry.

Discounts

I do offer discounts to students, teachers and retirees.

Please contact me to find out more.

Free Material

I offer a ton of free content on my blog, you can get started with my best free material here:

About my Books

My books are playbooks.

They are intended for developers who want to know how to use a specific library to actually solve problems and deliver value at work.

  • My books guide you only through the elements you need to know in order to get results.
  • My books are in PDF format and come with code and datasets, specifically designed for you to read and work-through on your computer.
  • My books give you direct access to me via email (what other books offer that?)
  • My books are a tiny business expense for a professional developer that can be charged to the company and is tax deductible in most regions.

Very few training materials on machine learning are focused on how to get results.

The vast majority are about repeating the same math and theory and ignore the one thing you really care about: how to use the methods on a project.

Comparison to Other Options

Let me provide some context for you on the pricing of the books:

There are free videos on youtube and tutorials on blogs.

There are very cheap video courses that teach you one or two tricks with an API.

  • My books teach you how to use a library to work through a project end-to-end and deliver value, not just a few tricks

A textbook on machine learning can cost $50 to $100.

  • All of my books are cheaper than the average machine learning textbook, and I expect you may be more productive, sooner.

A bootcamp or other in-person training can cost $1000+ dollars and last for days to weeks.

  • A bundle of all of my books is far cheaper than this, they allow you to work at your own pace, and the bundle covers more content than the average bootcamp.

Sorry, my books are not available on websites like Amazon.com.

I carefully decided to not put my books on Amazon for a number of reasons:

  • Amazon takes 65% of the sale price of self-published books, which would put me out of business.
  • Amazon offers very little control over the sales page and shopping cart experience.
  • Amazon does not allow me to contact my customers via email and offer direct support and updates.
  • Amazon does not allow me to deliver my book to customers as a PDF, the preferred format for my customers to read on the screen.

I hope that helps you understand my rationale.

I am sorry to hear that you’re having difficulty purchasing a book or bundle.

I use Stripe for Credit Card and PayPal services to support secure and encrypted payment processing on my website.

Some common problems when customers have a problem include:

  • Perhaps you can double check that your details are correct, just in case of a typo?
  • Perhaps you could try a different payment method, such as PayPal or Credit Card?
  • Perhaps you’re able to talk to your bank, just in case they blocked the transaction?

I often see customers trying to purchase with a domestic credit card or debit card that does not allow international purchases. This is easy to overcome by talking to your bank.

If you’re still having difficulty, please contact me and I can help investigate further.

When you purchase a book from my website and later review your bank statement, it is possible that you may see an additional small charge of one or two dollars.

The charge does not come from my website or payment processor.

Instead, the charge was added by your bank, credit card company, or financial institution. It may be because your bank adds an additional charge for online or international transactions.

This is rare but I have seen this happen once or twice before, often with credit cards used by enterprise or large corporate institutions.

My advice is to contact your bank or financial institution directly and ask them to explain the cause of the additional charge.

If you would like a copy of the payment transaction from my side (e.g. a screenshot from the payment processor), or a PDF tax invoice, please contact me directly.

I give away a lot of content for free. Most of it in fact.

It is important to me to help students and practitioners that are not well off, hence the enormous amount of free content that I provide.

You can access the free content:

I have thought very hard about this and I sell machine learning Ebooks for a few important reasons:

  • I use the revenue to support the site and all the non-paying customers.
  • I use the revenue to support my family so that I can continue to create content.
  • Practitioners that pay for tutorials are far more likely to work through them and learn something.
  • I target my books towards working professionals that are more likely to afford the materials.

Yes.

All updates to the book or books in your purchase are free.

Books are usually updated once every few months to fix bugs, typos and keep abreast of API changes.

Contact me anytime and check if there have been updates. Let me know what version of the book you have (version is listed on the copyright page).

Yes.

Please contact me anytime with questions about machine learning or the books.

One question at a time please.

Also, each book has a final chapter on getting more help and further reading and points to resources that you can use to get more help.

Yes, the books can help you get a job, but indirectly.

Getting a job is up to you.

It is a matching problem between an organization looking for someone to fill a role and you with your skills and background.

That being said, there are companies that are more interested in the value that you can provide to the business than the degrees that you have. Often, these are smaller companies and start-ups.

You can focus on providing value with machine learning by learning and getting very good at working through predictive modeling problems end-to-end. You can show this skill by developing a machine learning portfolio of completed projects.

My books are specifically designed to help you toward these ends. They teach you exactly how to use open source tools and libraries to get results in a predictive modeling project.

Do you have another question?

Please contact me.