We have previously seen that calculus is one of the core mathematical concepts in machine learning that permits us to understand the internal workings of different machine learning algorithms. Calculus, in turn, builds on several fundamental concepts that derive from algebra and geometry. The importance of having these fundamentals at hand will become even more […]
An ensemble learning method involves combining the predictions from multiple contributing models. Nevertheless, not all techniques that make use of multiple machine learning models are ensemble learning algorithms. It is common to divide a prediction problem into subproblems. For example, some problems naturally subdivide into independent but related subproblems and a machine learning model can […]
There is a lot of confusion for beginners around what algorithm is used to train deep learning neural network models. It is common to hear neural networks learn using the “back-propagation of error” algorithm or “stochastic gradient descent.” Sometimes, either of these algorithms is used as a shorthand for how a neural net is fit […]
Datasets may have missing values, and this can cause problems for many machine learning algorithms. As such, it is good practice to identify and replace missing values for each column in your input data prior to modeling your prediction task. This is called missing data imputation, or imputing for short. A sophisticated approach involves defining […]
Imbalanced classification involves developing predictive models on classification datasets that have a severe class imbalance. The challenge of working with imbalanced datasets is that most machine learning techniques will ignore, and in turn have poor performance on, the minority class, although typically it is performance on the minority class that is most important. One approach […]
The Bayes Optimal Classifier is a probabilistic model that makes the most probable prediction for a new example. It is described using the Bayes Theorem that provides a principled way for calculating a conditional probability. It is also closely related to the Maximum a Posteriori: a probabilistic framework referred to as MAP that finds the […]
Probability quantifies the uncertainty of the outcomes of a random variable. It is relatively easy to understand and compute the probability for a single variable. Nevertheless, in machine learning, we often have many random variables that interact in often complex and unknown ways. There are specific techniques that can be used to quantify the probability […]
Computer vision is a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with understanding the content of digital images, such as photographs and videos. Deep learning has made impressive inroads on challenging computer vision tasks and makes the promise of further advances. Before diving into the application of deep learning techniques to computer vision, it may be helpful […]
Deep learning neural networks learn a mapping function from inputs to outputs. This is achieved by updating the weights of the network in response to the errors the model makes on the training dataset. Updates are made to continually reduce this error until either a good enough model is found or the learning process gets […]
Matrices are a foundational element of linear algebra. Matrices are used throughout the field of machine learning in the description of algorithms and processes such as the input data variable (X) when training an algorithm. In this tutorial, you will discover matrices in linear algebra and how to manipulate them in Python. After completing this […]
