This course introduces you to one of the main types of modeling families of supervised Machine Learning: Classification. You will learn how to train predictive models to classify categorical outcomes and how to use error metrics to compare across different models. The hands-on section of this course focuses on using best practices for classification, including train and test splits, and handling data sets with unbalanced classes. By the end of this course you should be able to: -Differentiate uses and applications of classification and classification ensembles -Describe and use logistic regression models -Describe and use decision tree and tree-ensemble models -Describe and use other ensemble methods for classification -Use a variety of error metrics to compare and select the classification model that best suits your data -Use oversampling and undersampling as techniques to handle unbalanced classes in a data set Who should take this course? This course targets aspiring data scientists interested in acquiring hands-on experience with Supervised Machine Learning Classification techniques in a business setting.

The words that are significant to a class can be used improve the precision-recall trade off in classification. And it is tougher (sorry Yogi!) when the target classes to predict have widely varying supports. But that does happen often with real world datasets. Case in point is the prediction of a near future CCU readmission of a patient based on a discharge note. Only a small fraction of patients get readmitted to CCU within 30 days of a discharge. Our analysis of MIMIC-III dataset in the previous post showed that over 93% of the patients did not require readmission.

In many real-world classification problems, we stumble upon training data with unbalanced classes. This means that the individual classes do not contain the same number of elements. For example, if we want to build an image-based skin cancer detection system using convolutional neural networks, we might encounter a dataset with about 95% negatives and 5% positives. This is for good reasons: Images associated with a negative diagnosis are way more common than images with a positive diagnosis. Rather than regarding this as a flaw in the dataset, we should leverage the additional information that we get.

So far I have talked about decision trees and ensembles. But I hope, I have made you understand the logic behind these concepts without getting too much into the mathematical details. In this post lets get into action, I will be implementing the concepts that we learned in these two blog posts. The only concept that I haven't discussed about is SVM. I suggest you to watch Professor Andrew Ng's week 7 videos on Coursera.

So far I have talked about decision trees and ensembles. But I hope, I have made you understand the logic behind these concepts without getting too much into the mathematical details. In this post lets get into action, I will be implementing the concepts that we learned in these two blog posts. The only concept that I haven't discussed about is SVM. I suggest you to watch Professor Andrew Ng's week 7 videos on Coursera.