What this book covers

Chapter 1, Giving Computers the Ability to Learn from Data, introduces you to the main subareas of machine learning to tackle various problem tasks. In addition, it discusses the essential steps for creating a typical machine learning model building pipeline that will guide us through the following chapters.

Chapter 2, Training Simple Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification, goes back to the origins of machine learning and introduces binary perceptron classifiers and adaptive linear neurons. This chapter is a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of pattern classification and focuses on the interplay of optimization algorithms and machine learning.

Chapter 3, A Tour of Machine Learning Classifiers Using Scikit-Learn, describes the essential machine learning algorithms for classification and provides practical examples using one of the most popular and comprehensive open-source machine learning libraries, scikit-learn.

Chapter 4, Building Good Training Datasets – Data Preprocessing, discusses how to deal with the most common problems in unprocessed datasets, such as missing data. It also discusses several approaches to identify the most informative features in datasets and teaches you how to prepare variables of different types as proper inputs for machine learning algorithms.

Chapter 5, Compressing Data via Dimensionality Reduction, describes the essential techniques to reduce the number of features in a dataset to smaller sets while retaining most of their useful and discriminatory information. It discusses the standard approach to dimensionality reduction via principal component analysis and compares it to supervised and nonlinear transformation techniques.

Chapter 6, Learning Best Practices for Model Evaluation and Hyperparameter Tuning, discusses the do’s and don’ts for estimating the performances of predictive models. Moreover, it discusses different metrics for measuring the performance of our models and techniques to fine-tune machine learning algorithms.

Chapter 7, Combining Different Models for Ensemble Learning, introduces you to the different concepts of combining multiple learning algorithms effectively. It teaches you how to build ensembles of experts to overcome the weaknesses of individual learners, resulting in more accurate and reliable predictions.

Chapter 8, Applying Machine Learning to Sentiment Analysis, discusses the essential steps to transform textual data into meaningful representations for machine learning algorithms to predict the opinions of people based on their writing.

Chapter 9, Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis, discusses the essential techniques for modeling linear relationships between target and response variables to make predictions on a continuous scale. After introducing different linear models, it also talks about polynomial regression and tree-based approaches.

Chapter 10, Working with Unlabeled Data – Clustering Analysis, shifts the focus to a different subarea of machine learning, unsupervised learning. We apply algorithms from three fundamental families of clustering algorithms to find groups of objects that share a certain degree of similarity.

Chapter 11, Implementing a Multilayer Artificial Neural Network from Scratch, extends the concept of gradient-based optimization, which we first introduced in Chapter 2, Training Simple Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification, to build powerful, multilayer neural networks based on the popular backpropagation algorithm in Python.

Chapter 12, Parallelizing Neural Network Training with PyTorch, builds upon the knowledge from the previous chapter to provide you with a practical guide for training neural networks more efficiently. The focus of this chapter is on PyTorch, an open-source Python library that allows us to utilize multiple cores of modern GPUs and construct deep neural networks from common building blocks via a user-friendly and flexible API.

Chapter 13, Going Deeper – The Mechanics of PyTorch, picks up where the previous chapter left off and introduces more advanced concepts and functionality of PyTorch. PyTorch is an extraordinarily vast and sophisticated library, and this chapter walks you through concepts such as dynamic computation graphs and automatic differentiation. You will also learn how to use PyTorch’s object-oriented API to implement complex neural networks and how PyTorch Lightning helps you with best practices and minimizing boilerplate code.

Chapter 14, Classifying Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, introduces convolutional neural networks (CNNs). A CNN represents a particular type of deep neural network architecture that is particularly well-suited for working with image datasets. Due to their superior performance compared to traditional approaches, CNNs are now widely used in computer vision to achieve state-of-the-art results for various image recognition tasks. Throughout this chapter, you will learn how convolutional layers can be used as powerful feature extractors for image classification.

Chapter 15, Modeling Sequential Data Using Recurrent Neural Networks, introduces another popular neural network architecture for deep learning that is especially well suited for working with text and other types of sequential data and time series data. As a warm-up exercise, this chapter introduces recurrent neural networks for predicting the sentiment of movie reviews. Then, we will teach recurrent networks to digest information from books in order to generate entirely new text.

Chapter 16, Transformers – Improving Natural Language Processing with Attention Mechanisms, focuses on the latest trends in natural language processing and explains how attention mechanisms help with modeling complex relationships in long sequences. In particular, this chapter describes the influential transformer architecture and state-of-the-art transformer models such as BERT and GPT.

Chapter 17, Generative Adversarial Networks for Synthesizing New Data, introduces a popular adversarial training regime for neural networks that can be used to generate new, realistic-looking images. The chapter starts with a brief introduction to autoencoders, which is a particular type of neural network architecture that can be used for data compression. The chapter then shows you how to combine the decoder part of an autoencoder with a second neural network that can distinguish between real and synthesized images. By letting two neural networks compete with each other in an adversarial training approach, you will implement a generative adversarial network that generates new handwritten digits.

Chapter 18, Graph Neural Networks for Capturing Dependencies in Graph Structured Data, goes beyond working with tabular datasets, images, and text. This chapter introduces graph neural networks that operate on graph-structured data, such as social media networks and molecules. After explaining the fundamentals of graph convolutions, this chapter includes a tutorial showing you how to implement predictive models for molecular data.

Chapter 19, Reinforcement Learning for Decision Making in Complex Environments, covers a subcategory of machine learning that is commonly used for training robots and other autonomous systems. This chapter starts by introducing the basics of reinforcement learning (RL) to become familiar with the agent/environment interactions, the reward process of RL systems, and the concept of learning from experience. After learning about the main categories of RL, you will implement and train an agent that can navigate in a grid world environment using the Q-learning algorithm. Finally, this chapter introduces the deep Q-learning algorithm, which is a variant of Q-learning that uses deep neural networks.