Machine Learning with Spark and Python

Essential Techniques for Predictive Analytics

Michael Bowles

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119561934
• eBook ISBN: 9781119561958
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Machine Learning with Spark and Python Essential Techniques for Predictive Analytics, Second Edition simplifies ML for practical uses by focusing on two key algorithms. This new second edition improves with the addition of Spark—a ML framework from the Apache foundation. By implementing Spark, machine learning students can easily process much large data sets and call the spark algorithms using ordinary Python code. Machine Learning with Spark and Python focuses on two algorithm families (linear methods and ensemble methods) that effectively predict outcomes. This type of problem covers many use cases such as what ad to place on a web page, predicting prices in securities markets, or detecting credit card fraud. The focus on two families gives enough room for full descriptions of the mechanisms at work in the algorithms. Then the code examples serve to illustrate the workings of the machinery with specific hackable code.

CHAPTER 1
The Two Essential Algorithms for Making Predictions

This book focuses on the machine learning process and so covers just a few of the most effective and widely used algorithms. It does not provide a survey of machine learning techniques. Too many of the algorithms that might be included in a survey are not actively used by practitioners.

This book deals with one class of machine learning problems, generally referred to as function approximation. Function approximation is a subset of problems that are called supervised learning problems. Linear regression and its classifier cousin, logistic regression, provide familiar examples of algorithms for function approximation problems. Function approximation problems include an enormous breadth of practical classification and regression problems in all sorts of arenas, including text classification, search responses, ad placements, spam filtering, predicting customer behavior, diagnostics, and so forth. The list is almost endless.

Broadly speaking, this book covers two classes of algorithms for solving function approximation problems: penalized linear regression methods and ensemble methods. This chapter introduces you to both of these algorithms, outlines some of their characteristics, and reviews the results of comparative studies of algorithm performance in order to demonstrate their consistent high performance.

This chapter then discusses the process of building predictive models. It describes the kinds of problems that you'll be able to address with the tools covered here and the flexibilities that you have in how you set up your problem and define the features that you'll use for making predictions. It describes process steps involved in building a predictive model and qualifying it for deployment.

Why Are These Two Algorithms So Useful?

Several factors make the penalized linear regression and ensemble methods a useful collection. Stated simply, they will provide optimum or near-optimum performance on the vast majority of predictive analytics (function approximation) problems encountered in practice, including big data sets, little data sets, wide data sets, tall skinny data sets, complicated problems, and simple problems. Evidence for this assertion can be found in two papers by Rich Caruana and his colleagues:

• “An Empirical Comparison of Supervised Learning Algorithms,” by Rich Caruana and Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil¹
• “An Empirical Evaluation of Supervised Learning in High Dimensions,” by Rich Caruana, Nikos Karampatziakis, and Ainur Yessenalina²

In those two papers, the authors chose a variety of classification problems and applied a variety of different algorithms to build predictive models. The models were run on test data that were not included in training the models, and then the algorithms included in the studies were ranked on the basis of their performance on the problems. The first study compared 9 different basic algorithms on 11 different machine learning (binary classification) problems. The problems used in the study came from a wide variety of areas, including demographic data, text processing, pattern recognition, physics, and biology. Table 1.1 lists the data sets used in the study using the same names given by the study authors. The table shows how many attributes were available for predicting outcomes for each of the data sets, and it shows what percentage of the examples were positive.

Table 1.1: Sketch of Problems in Machine Learning Comparison Study

DATA SET NAME	NUMBER OF ATTRIBUTES	% OF EXAMPLES THAT ARE POSITIVE
Adult	14	25
Bact	11	69
Cod	15	50
Calhous	9	52
Cov_Type	54	36
HS	200	24
Letter.p1	16	3
Letter.p2	16	53
Medis	63	11
Mg	124	17
Slac	59	50

The term positive example in a classification problem means an experiment (a line of data from the input data set) in which the outcome is positive. For example, if the classifier is being designed to determine whether a radar return signal indicates the presence of an airplane, then the positive example would be those returns where there was actually an airplane in the radar's field of view. The term positive comes from this sort of example where the two outcomes represent presence or absence. Other examples include presence or absence of disease in a medical test or presence or absence of cheating on a tax return.

Not all classification problems deal with presence or absence. For example, determining the gender of an author by machine-reading his or her text or machine-analyzing a handwriting sample has two classes—male and female—but there's no sense in which one is the absence of the other. In these cases, there's some arbitrariness in the assignment of the designations “positive” and “negative.” The assignments of positive and negative can be arbitrary, but once chosen must be used consistently.

Some of the problems in the first study had many more examples of one class than the other. These are called unbalanced. For example, the two data sets Letter.p1 and Letter.p2 pose closely related problems in co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: The Two Essential Algorithms for Making Predictions
• CHAPTER 2: Understand the Problem by Understanding the Data
• CHAPTER 3: Predictive Model Building: Balancing Performance, Complexity, and Big Data
• CHAPTER 4: Penalized Linear Regression
• CHAPTER 5: Building Predictive Models Using Penalized Linear Methods
• CHAPTER 6: Ensemble Methods
• CHAPTER 7: Building Ensemble Models with Python
• Index
• End User License Agreement