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Python Machine Learning

You're reading from   Python Machine Learning Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow 2

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789955750
Length 772 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
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Authors (2):
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Vahid Mirjalili Vahid Mirjalili
Author Profile Icon Vahid Mirjalili
Vahid Mirjalili
Sebastian Raschka Sebastian Raschka
Author Profile Icon Sebastian Raschka
Sebastian Raschka
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Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Giving Computers the Ability to Learn from Data 2. Training Simple Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification FREE CHAPTER 3. A Tour of Machine Learning Classifiers Using scikit-learn 4. Building Good Training Datasets – Data Preprocessing 5. Compressing Data via Dimensionality Reduction 6. Learning Best Practices for Model Evaluation and Hyperparameter Tuning 7. Combining Different Models for Ensemble Learning 8. Applying Machine Learning to Sentiment Analysis 9. Embedding a Machine Learning Model into a Web Application 10. Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis 11. Working with Unlabeled Data – Clustering Analysis 12. Implementing a Multilayer Artificial Neural Network from Scratch 13. Parallelizing Neural Network Training with TensorFlow 14. Going Deeper – The Mechanics of TensorFlow 15. Classifying Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks 16. Modeling Sequential Data Using Recurrent Neural Networks 17. Generative Adversarial Networks for Synthesizing New Data 18. Reinforcement Learning for Decision Making in Complex Environments 19. Other Books You May Enjoy 20. Index

Handling categorical data

So far, we have only been working with numerical values. However, it is not uncommon for real-world datasets to contain one or more categorical feature columns. In this section, we will make use of simple yet effective examples to see how to deal with this type of data in numerical computing libraries.

When we are talking about categorical data, we have to further distinguish between ordinal and nominal features. Ordinal features can be understood as categorical values that can be sorted or ordered. For example, t-shirt size would be an ordinal feature, because we can define an order: XL > L > M. In contrast, nominal features don't imply any order and, to continue with the previous example, we could think of t-shirt color as a nominal feature since it typically doesn't make sense to say that, for example, red is larger than blue.

Categorical data encoding with pandas

Before we explore different techniques for handling such categorical...

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