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 Decision Tree Learning


When Does Deep Learning Work Better Than SVMs or Random Forests?

@machinelearnbot

If we tackle a supervised learning problem, my advice is to start with the simplest hypothesis space first. I.e., try a linear model such as logistic regression. If this doesn't work "well" (i.e., it doesn't meet our expectation or performance criterion that we defined earlier), I would move on to the next experiment. I would say that random forests are probably THE "worry-free" approach - if such a thing exists in ML: There are no real hyperparameters to tune (maybe except for the number of trees; typically, the more trees we have the better). On the contrary, there are a lot of knobs to be turned in SVMs: Choosing the "right" kernel, regularization penalties, the slack variable, ... Both random forests and SVMs are non-parametric models (i.e., the complexity grows as the number of training samples increases).


Want to know how to choose Machine Learning algorithm?

@machinelearnbot

Machine Learning is the foundation for today's insights on customer, products, costs and revenues which learns from the data provided to its algorithms. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to give movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend products based on other customers bought before. Decision Trees: Decision tree output is very easy to understand even for people from non-analytical background. It does not require any statistical knowledge to read and interpret them. Fastest way to identify most significant variables and relation between two or more variables.


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@machinelearnbot

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Random Forests explained intuitively

@machinelearnbot

Say, you appeared for the position of Statistical analyst at WalmartLabs. Now like most of the companies, you don't just have one round of interview. You have multiple rounds of interviews. Each one of these interviews is chaired by independent panels. Generally, even the questions asked in these interviews differ from each other.


Building Trust in Machine Learning Models (using LIME in Python)

#artificialintelligence

The value is not in software, the value is in data, and this is really important for every single company, that they understand what data they've got. More and more companies are now aware of the power of data. Machine Learning models are increasing in popularity and are now being used to solve a wide variety of business problems using data. Having said that, it is also true that there is always a trade-off between accuracy of models & its interpretability. In general, if accuracy has to be improved, data scientists have to resort to using complicated algorithms like Bagging, Boosting, Random Forests etc. which are "Blackbox" methods.


How the random forest algorithm works in machine learning 7wData

#artificialintelligence

You are going to learn the most popular classification algorithm. Which is the Random forest algorithm. As a motivation to go further I am going to give you one of the best advantages of random forest. The Same algorithm both for classification and regression, You mind be thinking I am kidding. But the truth is, Yes we can use the same random forest algorithm both for classification and regression.


Optimization of Tree Ensembles

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tree ensemble models such as random forests and boosted trees are among the most widely used and practically successful predictive models in applied machine learning and business analytics. Although such models have been used to make predictions based on exogenous, uncontrollable independent variables, they are increasingly being used to make predictions where the independent variables are controllable and are also decision variables. In this paper, we study the problem of tree ensemble optimization: given a tree ensemble that predicts some dependent variable using controllable independent variables, how should we set these variables so as to maximize the predicted value? We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer optimization problem. We theoretically examine the strength of our formulation, provide a hierarchy of approximate formulations with bounds on approximation quality and exploit the structure of the problem to develop two large-scale solution methods, one based on Benders decomposition and one based on iteratively generating tree split constraints. We test our methodology on real data sets, including two case studies in drug design and customized pricing, and show that our methodology can efficiently solve large-scale instances to near or full optimality, and outperforms solutions obtained by heuristic approaches. In our drug design case, we show how our approach can identify compounds that efficiently trade-off predicted performance and novelty with respect to existing, known compounds. In our customized pricing case, we show how our approach can efficiently determine optimal store-level prices under a random forest model that delivers excellent predictive accuracy.


Simple Decision Tree Excel Add-in

@machinelearnbot

Simple Decision Tree is an Excel Add-in created by Thomas Seyller. The Add-in is released under the terms of GPL v3 with additional permissions. Thomas created this Add-in for the Stanford Decisions and Ethics Center and open-sourced it for the Decision Professionals Network. This software has been extensively used to teach Decision Analysis at Stanford University.


Mining of health and disease events on Twitter: validating search protocols within the setting of Indonesia

arXiv.org Machine Learning

As of May 2016, there are 24.34 million Indonesian, or around 10% of the population being active monthly on Twitter [1], sharing news, events, as well as their personal feelings and experiences including healthrelated information. Twitter offers a potential for data mining of public information flows [2] and these massive data sources may be exploited for public health monitoring and surveillance purposes [3]. Previous studies have explored the use of Twitter, for example, to track levels of disease activity [4], to predicts heart disease mortality [5], and for measuring health-related quality of life [6]. However, the validity of twitter mining protocols to correctly detect health and disease events is one methodological challenge of this media. This study seeks to validate a search protocol of ill health-related terms using real-time Twitter data which can later be used to understand if, and how, twitter can reveal information on the current health situation in Indonesia. In this validation study of mining protocols, we: 1) extracted geo-located conversations related to health and disease postings on Twitter using a set of predefined keywords, 2) assessed the prevalence, frequency and timing of such content in these conversations, and 3) validated how this search protocol was able to detect relevant disease tweets.


Implementing Decision Trees using Scikit-Learn โ€“ Prashant Gupta โ€“ Medium

#artificialintelligence

Scikit-Learn is a popular library for Machine Learning in python programming language. If you want to test your knowledge with just a few lines of code, scikit-learn is what you need. From Linear and Logistic Regression to SVM and KNN, you name and scikit-learn has it. You will often need to prepare and transform your data in a form that is suitable for scikit-learn to use for training the models. Pandas is an awesome library for python which can be used for this purpose.