Choosing a classifier

Note

The following figures my be indecipherable if viewed in black and white. Color versions of these figures can be found on Packt's website. Please make sure you seek these out for a full understanding of the material!

These are just four of the most popular classifiers out there, but there are many more to choose from. Although some classification mechanisms perform better on some types of datasets than others, it can be hard to develop intuition as to exactly the ones they are suitable for. In order to help with this, we will be examining the efficacy of our four classifiers on four different two-dimensional made-up datasets, each with a vastly different optimal decision boundary. In doing so, we will learn more about the characteristics of each classifier and gain a better sense of the kinds of data they might be better suited for.

The four datasets are depicted in Figure 10.11:

Figure 10.11: A plot depicting the class patterns of our four illustrative and contrived...