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Machine Learning Algorithms

You're reading from   Machine Learning Algorithms A reference guide to popular algorithms for data science and machine learning

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781785889622
Length 360 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Giuseppe Bonaccorso Giuseppe Bonaccorso
Author Profile Icon Giuseppe Bonaccorso
Giuseppe Bonaccorso
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Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. A Gentle Introduction to Machine Learning FREE CHAPTER 2. Important Elements in Machine Learning 3. Feature Selection and Feature Engineering 4. Linear Regression 5. Logistic Regression 6. Naive Bayes 7. Support Vector Machines 8. Decision Trees and Ensemble Learning 9. Clustering Fundamentals 10. Hierarchical Clustering 11. Introduction to Recommendation Systems 12. Introduction to Natural Language Processing 13. Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis in NLP 14. A Brief Introduction to Deep Learning and TensorFlow 15. Creating a Machine Learning Architecture

Elements of information theory

A machine learning problem can also be analyzed in terms of information transfer or exchange. Our dataset is composed of n features, which are considered independent (for simplicity, even if it's often a realistic assumption) drawn from n different statistical distributions. Therefore, there are n probability density functions pi(x) which must be approximated through other n qi(x) functions. In any machine learning task, it's very important to understand how two corresponding distributions diverge and what is the amount of information we lose when approximating the original dataset.

The most useful measure is called entropy:

 

This value is proportional to the uncertainty of X and it's measured in bits (if the logarithm has another base, this unit can change too). For many purposes, a high entropy is preferable...

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