You're reading from Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn Develop machine learning and deep learning models with Python

Product type Paperback

Published in Feb 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801819312

Length 774 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

PyTorch

Concepts

Deep Learning

Authors (3):

Sebastian Raschka

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Vahid Mirjalili

View More author details

Table of Contents (22) Chapters

Preface

1. Giving Computers the Ability to Learn from Data FREE CHAPTER

2. Training Simple Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification

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. Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis

10. Working with Unlabeled Data – Clustering Analysis

11. Implementing a Multilayer Artificial Neural Network from Scratch

12. Parallelizing Neural Network Training with PyTorch

13. Going Deeper – The Mechanics of PyTorch

14. Classifying Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

15. Modeling Sequential Data Using Recurrent Neural Networks

16. Transformers – Improving Natural Language Processing with Attention Mechanisms

17. Generative Adversarial Networks for Synthesizing New Data

18. Graph Neural Networks for Capturing Dependencies in Graph Structured Data

19. Reinforcement Learning for Decision Making in Complex Environments

20. Other Books You May Enjoy

21. 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; 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.