Machine Learning with Python Virtual Classroom Live January 27, 2020

Course Overview

Part 1: Overview of Data Science

1. Data Science as a quantitative discipline
   • How to define Data Science scopes
   • The many faces of Data Science: Data Mining, Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Predictive Modeling, Statistical Learning, Mathematical Modeling. What are these all about?
   • Data Mining as a data exploration process
   • Machine Learning: supervised vs. unsupervised
   • Machine Learning vs. Predictive Analytics
   • Big Data Analytics: what is it and why it's important
2. Overview of a Data Mining process cycle
   • Understanding business needs and identifying new business opportunities
   • Formulating a business problem and associated requirements
   • Defining key quantitative metrics to measure success and evaluating business benefits
   • Translating business requirements into technical requirements and documentation
   • Formulating data models based on business and technical requirements
   • Identifying a set of quantitative models based on technical requirements and metrics of success
   • Running the models and evaluating results
   • Selecting the best model
   • Deploying the model

Part 2: The Data Foundation

1. Data sources
2. Types of data
   • Structured vs. unstructured data
   • Static data vs. real-time data
   • Types of data attributes: numerical vs. categorical
   • Role of time factor and time trends in data analysis
3. Working with missing values
   • Main causes of missing data
   • Understanding the importance of missing information
   • Types of missing information
   • Restoring missing values
   • Imputing missing values and selecting imputation techniques
   • Understanding and evaluating potential consequences of manipulating records with missing values
4. Working with outliers
   • Defining quantitative criteria for outlier detection in 1D cases
   • Understanding role of outliers in model building
   • Deciding on outlier removal
   • Defining outlier detection metrics in multi-dimensional space
5. Working with duplicate records
   • Defining duplicates
   • Understanding sources of duplicates
   • Deciding on duplicate removal

Part 3: Sampling and Hypothesis Testing

1. Why sampling may be important for Machine Learning
2. Sampling techniques and sample bias
3. Statistical hypothesis
4. Z-score, t-score and F statistic
5. P-values
6. Implementation of hypothesis testing for model evaluation analysis

Part 4: Machine Learning Fundamentals

1. What is Machine Learning?
2. Supervised vs. unsupervised learning
3. Overview of supervised Machine Learning
   • Regression models
   • Classification models
4. Overview of unsupervised Machine Learning
   • Clustering methods
   • Principal component analysis and dimension reduction
   • Association rules
5. Overview of major steps in building and testing quantitative models
   • Criteria for model selection
   • How to prepare a training set
   • Criteria for selecting model attributes/predictors
   • Working with collinear variables
   • Addressing imbalance problem
   • Dealing with over-fitting; bias-variance tradeoff
   • Validation and cross-validation

Part 5: Building a Linear Regression Model with Python

1. Univariate regression vs. multiple regression
2. Mathematical foundation of linear regression overview: least square method vs. maximum likelihood method
3. Model assumptions
4. Working with continuous attributes
5. Dealing with collinear variable
6. Model subset selection:
   • Forward stepwise selection
   • Backward selection
   • Shrinkage methods: ridge regression and Lasso
   • Dimension reduction
   • Information criteria
7. Automating model selection procedure
8. Model parameter evaluation, R squared vs. adjusted R squared
9. Validating the model
10. Working with categorical variables
11. Considering input variable interactions

Part 6: Example of building a Classification Model with Python

1. Dealing with imbalanced training sets
2. Understanding confusion matrix
3. Evaluating binary classifiers using ROC / AUC

Part 7: Example of Cluster Analysis with Python

1. Overview of cluster analysis mathematical foundation
2. K-means clustering method
   • Algorithm overview
   • Convergence criteria
   • How to determine the number of clusters

Part 8: Dimension Reduction techniques with Python

1. What is dimension reduction?
2. The practical goals of dimension reduction implementation
3. Principal component analysis vs. singular value decomposition
4. How many components to choose

Part 9: Class Conclusion

1. What was not covered in the class

2. Big Data Analytics – the future of machine learning: main tools and concepts

Prerequisites

Intermediate level data analysts interested in expanding their data mining processes. We emphasize Data Foundation and Machine Learning concepts. All exercises are performed using Python.