You're reading from Python Machine Learning by Example Build intelligent systems using Python, TensorFlow 2, PyTorch, and scikit-learn

Product type Paperback

Published in Oct 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800209718

Length 526 pages

Edition 3rd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

PyTorch

Concepts

Machine Learning

Author (1):

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

View More author details

Table of Contents (17) Chapters

Preface

1. Getting Started with Machine Learning and Python

2. Building a Movie Recommendation Engine with Naïve Bayes FREE CHAPTER

3. Recognizing Faces with Support Vector Machine

4. Predicting Online Ad Click-Through with Tree-Based Algorithms

5. Predicting Online Ad Click-Through with Logistic Regression

6. Scaling Up Prediction to Terabyte Click Logs

7. Predicting Stock Prices with Regression Algorithms

8. Predicting Stock Prices with Artificial Neural Networks

9. Mining the 20 Newsgroups Dataset with Text Analysis Techniques

10. Discovering Underlying Topics in the Newsgroups Dataset with Clustering and Topic Modeling

11. Machine Learning Best Practices

12. Categorizing Images of Clothing with Convolutional Neural Networks

13. Making Predictions with Sequences Using Recurrent Neural Networks

14. Making Decisions in Complex Environments with Reinforcement Learning

15. Other Books You May Enjoy

16. Index

Feature selection using random forest

To recap, random forest is bagging over a set of individual decision trees. Each tree considers a random subset of the features when searching for the best splitting point at each node. And, in a decision tree, only those significant features (along with their splitting values) are used to constitute tree nodes. Consider the forest as a whole: the more frequently a feature is used in a tree node, the more important it is. In other words, we can rank the importance of features based on their occurrences in nodes among all trees, and select the top most important ones.

A trained RandomForestClassifier module in scikit-learn comes with an attribute, feature_importances_, indicating the feature importance, which is calculated as the proportion of occurrences in tree nodes. Again, we will examine feature selection with random forest on the dataset with 100,000 ad click samples: