Machine learning involves the use of machine learning algorithms and models. For beginners, this is very confusing as often “machine learning algorithm” is used interchangeably with “machine learning model.” Are they the same thing or something different? As a developer, your intuition with “algorithms” like sort algorithms and search algorithms will help to clear up […]
Bagging is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that combines the predictions from many decision trees. It is also easy to implement given that it has few key hyperparameters and sensible heuristics for configuring these hyperparameters. Bagging performs well in general and provides the basis for a whole field of ensemble of decision tree algorithms such […]
Degrees of freedom is an important concept from statistics and engineering. It is often employed to summarize the number of values used in the calculation of a statistic, such as a sample statistic or in a statistical hypothesis test. In machine learning, the degrees of freedom may refer to the number of parameters in the […]
Extra Trees is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that combines the predictions from many decision trees. It is related to the widely used random forest algorithm. It can often achieve as-good or better performance than the random forest algorithm, although it uses a simpler algorithm to construct the decision trees used as members of the […]
Random forest is an ensemble machine learning algorithm. It is perhaps the most popular and widely used machine learning algorithm given its good or excellent performance across a wide range of classification and regression predictive modeling problems. It is also easy to use given that it has few key hyperparameters and sensible heuristics for configuring […]
Voting is an ensemble machine learning algorithm. For regression, a voting ensemble involves making a prediction that is the average of multiple other regression models. In classification, a hard voting ensemble involves summing the votes for crisp class labels from other models and predicting the class with the most votes. A soft voting ensemble involves […]
What if I have more Columns than Rows in my dataset? Machine learning datasets are often structured or tabular data comprised of rows and columns. The columns that are fed as input to a model are called predictors or “p” and the rows are samples “n“. Most machine learning algorithms assume that there are many […]
Not all classification predictive models support multi-class classification. Algorithms such as the Perceptron, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machines were designed for binary classification and do not natively support classification tasks with more than two classes. One approach for using binary classification algorithms for multi-classification problems is to split the multi-class classification dataset into multiple […]
Stacking or Stacked Generalization is an ensemble machine learning algorithm. It uses a meta-learning algorithm to learn how to best combine the predictions from two or more base machine learning algorithms. The benefit of stacking is that it can harness the capabilities of a range of well-performing models on a classification or regression task and […]
Machine learning is a field of study and is concerned with algorithms that learn from examples. Classification is a task that requires the use of machine learning algorithms that learn how to assign a class label to examples from the problem domain. An easy to understand example is classifying emails as “spam” or “not spam.” […]
