Upcoming changes to the scikit-learn library for machine learning are reported through the use of FutureWarning messages when the code is run. Warning messages can be confusing to beginners as it looks like there is a problem with the code or that they have done something wrong. Warning messages are also not good for operational […]
Spot-checking algorithms is a technique in applied machine learning designed to quickly and objectively provide a first set of results on a new predictive modeling problem. Unlike grid searching and other types of algorithm tuning that seek the optimal algorithm or optimal configuration for an algorithm, spot-checking is intended to evaluate a diverse set of […]
How to Score Probability Predictions in Python and Develop an Intuition for Different Metrics. Predicting probabilities instead of class labels for a classification problem can provide additional nuance and uncertainty for the predictions. The added nuance allows more sophisticated metrics to be used to interpret and evaluate the predicted probabilities. In general, methods for the […]
Instead of predicting class values directly for a classification problem, it can be convenient to predict the probability of an observation belonging to each possible class. Predicting probabilities allows some flexibility including deciding how to interpret the probabilities, presenting predictions with uncertainty, and providing more nuanced ways to evaluate the skill of the model. Predicted […]
It can be more flexible to predict probabilities of an observation belonging to each class in a classification problem rather than predicting classes directly. This flexibility comes from the way that probabilities may be interpreted using different thresholds that allow the operator of the model to trade-off concerns in the errors made by the model, […]
How to predict classification or regression outcomes with scikit-learn models in Python. Once you choose and fit a final machine learning model in scikit-learn, you can use it to make predictions on new data instances. There is some confusion amongst beginners about how exactly to do this. I often see questions such as: How do […]
Test datasets are small contrived datasets that let you test a machine learning algorithm or test harness. The data from test datasets have well-defined properties, such as linearly or non-linearity, that allow you to explore specific algorithm behavior. The scikit-learn Python library provides a suite of functions for generating samples from configurable test problems for […]
Real-world data often has missing values. Data can have missing values for a number of reasons such as observations that were not recorded and data corruption. Handling missing data is important as many machine learning algorithms do not support data with missing values. In this tutorial, you will discover how to handle missing data for […]
It can be difficult to install a Python machine learning environment on Mac OS X. Python itself must be installed first, and then there are many packages to install, and it can be confusing for beginners. In this tutorial, you will discover how to setup a Python 3 machine learning and deep learning development environment […]
It can be difficult to install a Python machine learning environment on some platforms. Python itself must be installed first and then there are many packages to install, and it can be confusing for beginners. In this tutorial, you will discover how to set up a Python machine learning development environment using Anaconda. After completing […]
