Introduction

There are two main types of data, structured and unstructured. Structured data refers to data that has a defined format and is usually shaped as a table, such as data stored in an Excel sheet or a relational database. Unstructured data does not have a predefined schema. Anything that cannot be stored in a table falls under this category. Examples include voice files, images, and PDFs.

In this chapter, we will focus on structured data and creating machine learning models using XGBoost and Keras. The XGBoost algorithm is widely used by industry experts and researchers due to the speed at which it delivers high-precision models, and also due to its distributed nature. The distributed nature refers to the ability to process data and train models in parallel; this enables faster training and much shorter turnaround time for data scientists. Keras on the other hand lets us create neural network models. Neural networks work much better than boosting algorithms in some cases, but finding...