Ensemble Machine Learning in Python: Random Forest, AdaBoost (Udemy.com)

Ensemble Methods: Boosting, Bagging, Boostrap, and Statistical Machine Learning for Data Science in Python

Created by: Lazy Programmer Inc.

Produced in 2021

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What you will learn

  • Understand and derive the bias-variance decomposition
  • Understand the bootstrap method and its application to bagging
  • Understand why bagging improves classification and regression performance
  • Understand and implement Random Forest
  • Understand and implement AdaBoost

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Quality Score

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Overall Score : 90 / 100

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Course Description

In recent years, we've seen a resurgence in AI, or artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Machine learning has led to some amazing results, like being able to analyze medical images and predict diseases on-par with human experts.
Google's AlphaGo program was able to beat a world champion in the strategy game go using deep reinforcement learning.
Machine learning is even being used to program self driving cars, which is going to change the automotive industry forever. Imagine a world with drastically reduced car accidents, simply by removing the element of human error.
Google famously announced that they are now "machine learning first", and companies like NVIDIA and Amazon have followed suit, and this is what's going to drive innovation in the coming years.
Machine learning is embedded into all sorts of different products, and it's used in many industries, like finance, online advertising, medicine, and robotics.
It is a widely applicable tool that will benefit you no matter what industry you're in, and it will also open up a ton of career opportunities once you get good.
Machine learning also raises some philosophical questions. Are we building a machine that can think? What does it mean to be conscious? Will computers one day take over the world?
This course is all about ensemble methods.
We've already learned some classic machine learning models like k-nearest neighbor and decision tree. We've studied their limitations and drawbacks.
But what if we could combine these models to eliminate those limitations and produce a much more powerful classifier or regressor?
In this course you'll study ways to combine models like decision trees and logistic regression to build models that can reach much higher accuracies than the base models they are made of.
In particular, we will study the Random Forest and AdaBoost algorithms in detail.
To motivate our discussion, we will learn about an important topic in statistical learning, the bias-variance trade-off. We will then study the bootstrap technique and bagging as methods for reducing both bias and variance simultaneously.
We'll do plenty of experiments and use these algorithms on real datasets so you can see first-hand how powerful they are.
Since deep learning is so popular these days, we will study some interesting commonalities between random forests, AdaBoost, and deep learning neural networks.
All the materials for this course are FREE. You can download and install Python, Numpy, and Scipy with simple commands on Windows, Linux, or Mac.
This course focuses on "how to build and understand", not just "how to use". Anyone can learn to use an API in 15 minutes after reading some documentation. It's not about "remembering facts", it's about "seeing for yourself" via experimentation. It will teach you how to visualize what's happening in the model internally. If you want morethan just a superficial look at machine learning models, this course is for you.

Suggested Prerequisites:
  • Calculus (derivatives)
  • Probability
  • Object-oriented programming
  • Python coding: if/else, loops, lists, dicts, sets
  • Numpy coding: matrix and vector operations
  • Simple machine learning models like linear regression and decision trees


TIPS (for getting through the course):
  • Watch it at 2x.
  • Take handwritten notes. This will drastically increase your ability to retain the information.
  • Write down the equations. If you don't, I guarantee it will just look like gibberish.
  • Ask lots of questions on the discussion board. The more the better!
  • Realize that most exercises will take you days or weeks to complete.
  • Write code yourself, don't just sit there and look at my code.


WHAT ORDER SHOULD I TAKE YOUR COURSES IN?:
  • Check out the lecture "What order should I take your courses in?" (available in the Appendix of any of my courses, including the free Numpy course)

Who this course is for:
  • Understand the types of models that win machine learning contests (Netflix prize, Kaggle)
  • Students studying machine learning
  • Professionals who want to apply data science and machine learning to their work
  • Entrepreneurs who want to apply data science and machine learning to optimize their business
  • Students in computer science who want to learn more about data science and machine learning
  • Those who know some basic machine learning models but want to know how today's most powerful models (Random Forest, AdaBoost, and other ensemble methods) are built

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Instructor Details

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Today, I spend most of my time as an artificial intelligence and machine learning engineer with a focus on deep learning, although I have also been known as a data scientist, big data engineer, and full stack software engineer.
I received my masters degree in computer engineering with a specialization in machine learning and pattern recognition.
Experience includes online advertising and digital media as both a data scientist (optimizing click and conversion rates) and big data engineer (building data processing pipelines). Some big data technologies I frequently use are Hadoop, Pig, Hive, MapReduce, and Spark.
I've created deep learning models to predict click-through rate and user behavior, as well as for image and signal processing and modeling text.
My work in recommendation systems has applied Reinforcement Learning and Collaborative Filtering, and we validated the results using A/B testing.
I have taught undergraduate and graduate students in data science, statistics, machine learning, algorithms, calculus, computer graphics, and physics for students attending universities such as Columbia University, NYU, Hunter College, and The New School.
Multiple businesses have benefitted from my web programming expertise. I do all the backend (server), frontend (HTML/JS/CSS), and operations/deployment work. Some of the technologies I've used are: Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Bootstrap, jQuery (Javascript), Backbone, and Angular. For storage/databases I've used MySQL

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Reviews

4.5

49 total reviews

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Is to understand.

Good course with detailed explanations.

Beautiful. Explains why we need theory apart from the plug-n-play approach!

Its well explained

Good course so far!

The instructor is very good at simplifying a complex topic.

I just read adaboost section.
The content was not intutive. The instructor shows mathematics functions but it didn't show what are the advantages/usefulness of using such functions. He reads everything that is written on slides. He could use some pen and paper example which gives good intution of the example.

Although I'm in the beginning of the course, I have to say that I had seen tons of videos about bias-variance tradeoff but this is by far the best explanation.

Most insightful machine learning course I have ever taken! Love it!

Excellent instructor and course - I've done multiple courses by the same instructor and find his approach rigorous as well as easy to follow. Would highly recommend him.

They're a good way to help refresh some baseline ml knowledge we all forget sometimes!

Half of this course spends on how to be a good data scientist. While it is good and crucial, it wastes a lot of time that one can spend on learning the materials. I am totally fine the lecture contains a lot of theoretical presentations, but I feel like I spent one good hour on philosophy of s good data scientist.