Before we discuss the perceptron and related algorithms in more detail, let’s take a brief tour of the beginnings of machine learning. Trying to understand how the biological brain works in order to design an artificial intelligence (AI), Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published the first concept of a simplified brain cell, the so-called McCulloch-Pitts (MCP) neuron, in 1943 (A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity by W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5(4): 115-133, 1943).

Biological neurons are interconnected nerve cells in the brain that are involved in the processing and transmitting of chemical and electrical signals, which is illustrated in Figure 2.1:

Figure 2.1: A neuron processing chemical and electrical signals

McCulloch and Pitts described such a nerve cell as a simple logic gate with binary outputs; multiple...

In the previous section, we learned how Rosenblatt’s perceptron rule works; let’s now implement it in Python and apply it to the Iris dataset that we introduced in Chapter 1, Giving Computers the Ability to Learn from Data.

An object-oriented perceptron API

We will take an object-oriented approach to defining the perceptron interface as a Python class, which will allow us to initialize new Perceptron objects that can learn from data via a fit method and make predictions via a separate predict method. As a convention, we append an underscore (_) to attributes that are not created upon the initialization of the object, but we do this by calling the object’s other methods, for example, self.w_.

In this section, we will take a look at another type of single-layer neural network (NN): ADAptive LInear NEuron (Adaline). Adaline was published by Bernard Widrow and his doctoral student Tedd Hoff only a few years after Rosenblatt’s perceptron algorithm, and it can be considered an improvement on the latter (An Adaptive “Adaline” Neuron Using Chemical “Memistors”, Technical Report Number 1553-2 by B. Widrow and colleagues, Stanford Electron Labs, Stanford, CA, October 1960).

The Adaline algorithm is particularly interesting because it illustrates the key concepts of defining and minimizing continuous loss functions. This lays the groundwork for understanding other machine learning algorithms for classification, such as logistic regression, support vector machines, and multilayer neural networks, as well as linear regression models, which we will discuss in future chapters.

The key...

In this chapter, we gained a good understanding of the basic concepts of linear classifiers for supervised learning. After we implemented a perceptron, we saw how we can train adaptive linear neurons efficiently via a vectorized implementation of gradient descent and online learning via SGD.

Now that we have seen how to implement simple classifiers in Python, we are ready to move on to the next chapter, where we will use the Python scikit-learn machine learning library to get access to more advanced and powerful machine learning classifiers, which are commonly used in academia as well as in industry.

The object-oriented approach that we used to implement the perceptron and Adaline algorithms will help with understanding the scikit-learn API, which is implemented based on the same core concepts that we used in this chapter: the fit and predict methods. Based on these core concepts, we will learn about logistic regression for modeling class probabilities and support...