Ensemble Methods For Machine Learning

An up-to-date, self-contained introduction to a state-of-the-art machine learning approach, Ensemble Methods: Foundations and Algorithms shows how these accurate methods are used in real-world tasks. It gives you the necessary groundwork to carry out further research in this evolving field. After presenting background and terminology, the book covers the main algorithms and theories, including Boosting, Bagging, Random Forest, averaging and voting schemes, the Stacking method, mixture of experts, and diversity measures. It also discusses multiclass extension, noise tolerance, error-ambiguity and bias-variance decompositions, and recent progress in information theoretic diversity. Moving on to more advanced topics, the author explains how to achieve better performance through ensemble pruning and how to generate better clustering results by combining multiple clusterings. In addition, he describes developments of ensemble methods in semi-supervised learning, active learning, cost-sensitive learning, class-imbalance learning, and comprehensibility enhancement.

Ensemble machine learning combines the power of multiple machine learning approaches, working together to deliver models that are highly performant and highly accurate. Inside Ensemble Methods for Machine Learning you will find: Methods for classification, regression, and recommendations Sophisticated off-the-shelf ensemble implementations Random forests, boosting, and gradient boosting Feature engineering and ensemble diversity Interpretability and explainability for ensemble methods Ensemble machine learning trains a diverse group of machine learning models to work together, aggregating their output to deliver richer results than a single model. Now in Ensemble Methods for Machine Learning you’ll discover core ensemble methods that have proven records in both data science competitions and real-world applications. Hands-on case studies show you how each algorithm works in production. By the time you're done, you'll know the benefits, limitations, and practical methods of applying ensemble machine learning to real-world data, and be ready to build more explainable ML systems. About the Technology Automatically compare, contrast, and blend the output from multiple models to squeeze the best results from your data. Ensemble machine learning applies a “wisdom of crowds” method that dodges the inaccuracies and limitations of a single model. By basing responses on multiple perspectives, this innovative approach can deliver robust predictions even without massive datasets. About the Book Ensemble Methods for Machine Learning teaches you practical techniques for applying multiple ML approaches simultaneously. Each chapter contains a unique case study that demonstrates a fully functional ensemble method, with examples including medical diagnosis, sentiment analysis, handwriting classification, and more. There’s no complex math or theory—you’ll learn in a visuals-first manner, with ample code for easy experimentation! What’s Inside Bagging, boosting, and gradient boosting Methods for classification, regression, and retrieval Interpretability and explainability for ensemble methods Feature engineering and ensemble diversity About the Reader For Python programmers with machine learning experience. About the Author Gautam Kunapuli has over 15 years of experience in academia and the machine learning industry. Table of Contents PART 1 - THE BASICS OF ENSEMBLES 1 Ensemble methods: Hype or hallelujah? PART 2 - ESSENTIAL ENSEMBLE METHODS 2 Homogeneous parallel ensembles: Bagging and random forests 3 Heterogeneous parallel ensembles: Combining strong learners 4 Sequential ensembles: Adaptive boosting 5 Sequential ensembles: Gradient boosting 6 Sequential ensembles: Newton boosting PART 3 - ENSEMBLES IN THE WILD: ADAPTING ENSEMBLE METHODS TO YOUR DATA 7 Learning with continuous and count labels 8 Learning with categorical features 9 Explaining your ensembles

It is common wisdom that gathering a variety of views and inputs improves the process of decision making, and, indeed, underpins a democratic society. Dubbed “ensemble learning” by researchers in computational intelligence and machine learning, it is known to improve a decision system’s robustness and accuracy. Now, fresh developments are allowing researchers to unleash the power of ensemble learning in an increasing range of real-world applications. Ensemble learning algorithms such as “boosting” and “random forest” facilitate solutions to key computational issues such as face recognition and are now being applied in areas as diverse as object tracking and bioinformatics. Responding to a shortage of literature dedicated to the topic, this volume offers comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art ensemble learning techniques, including the random forest skeleton tracking algorithm in the Xbox Kinect sensor, which bypasses the need for game controllers. At once a solid theoretical study and a practical guide, the volume is a windfall for researchers and practitioners alike.

It is common wisdom that gathering a variety of views and inputs improves the process of decision making, and, indeed, underpins a democratic society. Dubbed “ensemble learning” by researchers in computational intelligence and machine learning, it is known to improve a decision system’s robustness and accuracy. Now, fresh developments are allowing researchers to unleash the power of ensemble learning in an increasing range of real-world applications. Ensemble learning algorithms such as “boosting” and “random forest” facilitate solutions to key computational issues such as face recognition and are now being applied in areas as diverse as object tracking and bioinformatics. Responding to a shortage of literature dedicated to the topic, this volume offers comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art ensemble learning techniques, including the random forest skeleton tracking algorithm in the Xbox Kinect sensor, which bypasses the need for game controllers. At once a solid theoretical study and a practical guide, the volume is a windfall for researchers and practitioners alike.

Implement machine learning algorithms to build ensemble models using Keras, H2O, Scikit-Learn, Pandas and more Key FeaturesApply popular machine learning algorithms using a recipe-based approachImplement boosting, bagging, and stacking ensemble methods to improve machine learning modelsDiscover real-world ensemble applications and encounter complex challenges in Kaggle competitionsBook Description Ensemble modeling is an approach used to improve the performance of machine learning models. It combines two or more similar or dissimilar machine learning algorithms to deliver superior intellectual powers. This book will help you to implement popular machine learning algorithms to cover different paradigms of ensemble machine learning such as boosting, bagging, and stacking. The Ensemble Machine Learning Cookbook will start by getting you acquainted with the basics of ensemble techniques and exploratory data analysis. You'll then learn to implement tasks related to statistical and machine learning algorithms to understand the ensemble of multiple heterogeneous algorithms. It will also ensure that you don't miss out on key topics, such as like resampling methods. As you progress, you’ll get a better understanding of bagging, boosting, stacking, and working with the Random Forest algorithm using real-world examples. The book will highlight how these ensemble methods use multiple models to improve machine learning results, as compared to a single model. In the concluding chapters, you'll delve into advanced ensemble models using neural networks, natural language processing, and more. You’ll also be able to implement models such as fraud detection, text categorization, and sentiment analysis. By the end of this book, you'll be able to harness ensemble techniques and the working mechanisms of machine learning algorithms to build intelligent models using individual recipes. What you will learnUnderstand how to use machine learning algorithms for regression and classification problemsImplement ensemble techniques such as averaging, weighted averaging, and max-votingGet to grips with advanced ensemble methods, such as bootstrapping, bagging, and stackingUse Random Forest for tasks such as classification and regressionImplement an ensemble of homogeneous and heterogeneous machine learning algorithmsLearn and implement various boosting techniques, such as AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting Machine, and XGBoostWho this book is for This book is designed for data scientists, machine learning developers, and deep learning enthusiasts who want to delve into machine learning algorithms to build powerful ensemble models. Working knowledge of Python programming and basic statistics is a must to help you grasp the concepts in the book.

Ensemble methods have been called the most influential development in Data Mining and Machine Learning in the past decade. They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components. Ensembles can provide a critical boost to industrial challenges -- from investment timing to drug discovery, and fraud detection to recommendation systems -- where predictive accuracy is more vital than model interpretability. Ensembles are useful with all modeling algorithms, but this book focuses on decision trees to explain them most clearly. After describing trees and their strengths and weaknesses, the authors provide an overview of regularization -- today understood to be a key reason for the superior performance of modern ensembling algorithms. The book continues with a clear description of two recent developments: Importance Sampling (IS) and Rule Ensembles (RE). IS reveals classic ensemble methods -- bagging, random forests, and boosting -- to be special cases of a single algorithm, thereby showing how to improve their accuracy and speed. REs are linear rule models derived from decision tree ensembles. They are the most interpretable version of ensembles, which is essential to applications such as credit scoring and fault diagnosis. Lastly, the authors explain the paradox of how ensembles achieve greater accuracy on new data despite their (apparently much greater) complexity. This book is aimed at novice and advanced analytic researchers and practitioners -- especially in Engineering, Statistics, and Computer Science. Those with little exposure to ensembles will learn why and how to employ this breakthrough method, and advanced practitioners will gain insight into building even more powerful models. Throughout, snippets of code in R are provided to illustrate the algorithms described and to encourage the reader to try the techniques. The authors are industry experts in data mining and machine learning who are also adjunct professors and popular speakers. Although early pioneers in discovering and using ensembles, they here distill and clarify the recent groundbreaking work of leading academics (such as Jerome Friedman) to bring the benefits of ensembles to practitioners. Table of Contents: Ensembles Discovered / Predictive Learning and Decision Trees / Model Complexity, Model Selection and Regularization / Importance Sampling and the Classic Ensemble Methods / Rule Ensembles and Interpretation Statistics / Ensemble Complexity

Predictive performance is the most important concern on many classification and regression problems. Ensemble learning algorithms combine the predictions from multiple models and are designed to perform better than any contributing ensemble member. Using clear explanations, standard Python libraries, and step-by-step tutorial lessons, you will discover how to confidently and effectively improve predictive modeling performance using ensemble algorithms.

Combine popular machine learning techniques to create ensemble models using Python Key FeaturesImplement ensemble models using algorithms such as random forests and AdaBoostApply boosting, bagging, and stacking ensemble methods to improve the prediction accuracy of your model Explore real-world data sets and practical examples coded in scikit-learn and KerasBook Description Ensembling is a technique of combining two or more similar or dissimilar machine learning algorithms to create a model that delivers superior predictive power. This book will demonstrate how you can use a variety of weak algorithms to make a strong predictive model. With its hands-on approach, you'll not only get up to speed on the basic theory but also the application of various ensemble learning techniques. Using examples and real-world datasets, you'll be able to produce better machine learning models to solve supervised learning problems such as classification and regression. Furthermore, you'll go on to leverage ensemble learning techniques such as clustering to produce unsupervised machine learning models. As you progress, the chapters will cover different machine learning algorithms that are widely used in the practical world to make predictions and classifications. You'll even get to grips with the use of Python libraries such as scikit-learn and Keras for implementing different ensemble models. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed in ensemble learning, and have the skills you need to understand which ensemble method is required for which problem, and successfully implement them in real-world scenarios. What you will learnImplement ensemble methods to generate models with high accuracyOvercome challenges such as bias and varianceExplore machine learning algorithms to evaluate model performanceUnderstand how to construct, evaluate, and apply ensemble modelsAnalyze tweets in real time using Twitter's streaming APIUse Keras to build an ensemble of neural networks for the MovieLens datasetWho this book is for This book is for data analysts, data scientists, machine learning engineers and other professionals who are looking to generate advanced models using ensemble techniques. An understanding of Python code and basic knowledge of statistics is required to make the most out of this book.