"Learn how to use decision trees and random forests for classification and regression, their respective limitations, and how the algorithms that build them work. Each chapter introduces a new data concern and then walks you through modifying the code, thus building the engine just-in-time. Along the way you will gain experience making decision trees and random forests work for you."--Back cover.

This practical guide provides nearly 200 self-contained recipes to help you solve machine learning challenges you may encounter in your daily work. If you’re comfortable with Python and its libraries, including pandas and scikit-learn, you’ll be able to address specific problems such as loading data, handling text or numerical data, model selection, and dimensionality reduction and many other topics. Each recipe includes code that you can copy and paste into a toy dataset to ensure that it actually works. From there, you can insert, combine, or adapt the code to help construct your application. Recipes also include a discussion that explains the solution and provides meaningful context. This cookbook takes you beyond theory and concepts by providing the nuts and bolts you need to construct working machine learning applications. You’ll find recipes for: Vectors, matrices, and arrays Handling numerical and categorical data, text, images, and dates and times Dimensionality reduction using feature extraction or feature selection Model evaluation and selection Linear and logical regression, trees and forests, and k-nearest neighbors Support vector machines (SVM), naïve Bayes, clustering, and neural networks Saving and loading trained models

Tree-based Methods for Statistical Learning in R provides a thorough introduction to both individual decision tree algorithms (Part I) and ensembles thereof (Part II). Part I of the book brings several different tree algorithms into focus, both conventional and contemporary. Building a strong foundation for how individual decision trees work will help readers better understand tree-based ensembles at a deeper level, which lie at the cutting edge of modern statistical and machine learning methodology. The book follows up most ideas and mathematical concepts with code-based examples in the R statistical language; with an emphasis on using as few external packages as possible. For example, users will be exposed to writing their own random forest and gradient tree boosting functions using simple for loops and basic tree fitting software (like rpart and party/partykit), and more. The core chapters also end with a detailed section on relevant software in both R and other opensource alternatives (e.g., Python, Spark, and Julia), and example usage on real data sets. While the book mostly uses R, it is meant to be equally accessible and useful to non-R programmers. Consumers of this book will have gained a solid foundation (and appreciation) for tree-based methods and how they can be used to solve practical problems and challenges data scientists often face in applied work. Features: Thorough coverage, from the ground up, of tree-based methods (e.g., CART, conditional inference trees, bagging, boosting, and random forests). A companion website containing additional supplementary material and the code to reproduce every example and figure in the book. A companion R package, called treemisc, which contains several data sets and functions used throughout the book (e.g., there’s an implementation of gradient tree boosting with LAD loss that shows how to perform the line search step by updating the terminal node estimates of a fitted rpart tree). Interesting examples that are of practical use; for example, how to construct partial dependence plots from a fitted model in Spark MLlib (using only Spark operations), or post-processing tree ensembles via the LASSO to reduce the number of trees while maintaining, or even improving performance.

This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.

Over the next few decades, machine learning and data science will transform the finance industry. With this practical book, analysts, traders, researchers, and developers will learn how to build machine learning algorithms crucial to the industry. You’ll examine ML concepts and over 20 case studies in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, along with natural language processing (NLP). Ideal for professionals working at hedge funds, investment and retail banks, and fintech firms, this book also delves deep into portfolio management, algorithmic trading, derivative pricing, fraud detection, asset price prediction, sentiment analysis, and chatbot development. You’ll explore real-life problems faced by practitioners and learn scientifically sound solutions supported by code and examples. This book covers: Supervised learning regression-based models for trading strategies, derivative pricing, and portfolio management Supervised learning classification-based models for credit default risk prediction, fraud detection, and trading strategies Dimensionality reduction techniques with case studies in portfolio management, trading strategy, and yield curve construction Algorithms and clustering techniques for finding similar objects, with case studies in trading strategies and portfolio management Reinforcement learning models and techniques used for building trading strategies, derivatives hedging, and portfolio management NLP techniques using Python libraries such as NLTK and scikit-learn for transforming text into meaningful representations

Missing data pose challenges to real-life data analysis. Simple ad-hoc fixes, like deletion or mean imputation, only work under highly restrictive conditions, which are often not met in practice. Multiple imputation replaces each missing value by multiple plausible values. The variability between these replacements reflects our ignorance of the true (but missing) value. Each of the completed data set is then analyzed by standard methods, and the results are pooled to obtain unbiased estimates with correct confidence intervals. Multiple imputation is a general approach that also inspires novel solutions to old problems by reformulating the task at hand as a missing-data problem. This is the second edition of a popular book on multiple imputation, focused on explaining the application of methods through detailed worked examples using the MICE package as developed by the author. This new edition incorporates the recent developments in this fast-moving field. This class-tested book avoids mathematical and technical details as much as possible: formulas are accompanied by verbal statements that explain the formula in accessible terms. The book sharpens the reader’s intuition on how to think about missing data, and provides all the tools needed to execute a well-grounded quantitative analysis in the presence of missing data.

This book gathers selected papers presented at the International Conference on Machine Intelligence and Soft Computing (ICMISC 2020), held jointly by Vignan’s Institute of Information Technology, Visakhapatnam, India and VFSTR Deemed to be University, Guntur, AP, India during 03-04 September 2020. Topics covered in the book include the artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic, cloud computing, evolutionary algorithms and computation, machine learning, metaheuristics and swarm intelligence, neuro-fuzzy system, soft computing and decision support systems, soft computing applications in actuarial science, soft computing for database deadlock resolution, soft computing methods in engineering, and support vector machine.