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Building Machine Learning Systems with Python - Richert, Coelho

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python - Richert, Coelho

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Where to Learn More about <strong>Machine</strong> <strong>Learning</strong><br />

Of course, winning something is nice, but you can gain a lot of useful experience<br />

just by participating. So, you have to stay tuned, especially after the competition is<br />

over and participants start sharing their approaches in the forum. Most of the time,<br />

winning is not about developing a new algorithm; it is about cleverly preprocessing,<br />

normalizing, and combining the existing methods.<br />

What was left out<br />

We did not cover every machine learning package available for <strong>Python</strong>. Given the<br />

limited space, we chose to focus on Scikit-learn. However, there are other options,<br />

and we list a few of them here:<br />

• Modular toolkit for Data Processing (MDP ) at http://mdp-toolkit.<br />

sourceforge.net<br />

• Pybrain at http://pybrain.org<br />

• <strong>Machine</strong> <strong>Learning</strong> Toolkit (MILK) at http://luispedro.org/software/<br />

milk<br />

° ° This package was developed by one of the authors of this book,<br />

and covers some algorithms and techniques that are not included<br />

in Scikit-learn.<br />

A more general resource is at http://mloss.org, which is a repository of open<br />

source machine learning software. As is usually the case <strong>with</strong> repositories such<br />

as this one, the quality varies between excellent, well-maintained software and<br />

projects that were one-offs and then abandoned. It may be worth checking out if<br />

your problem is very specific and none of the more general packages address it.<br />

Summary<br />

We are now truly at the end. We hope you have enjoyed the book and feel well<br />

equipped to start your own machine learning adventure.<br />

We also hope you have learned the importance of carefully testing your methods, in<br />

particular, of using correct cross-validation and not reporting training test results,<br />

which are an over-inflated estimate of how good your method really is.<br />

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