This open access book provides a wealth of hands-on examples that illustrate how hyperparameter tuning can be applied in practice and gives deep insights into the working mechanisms of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods. The aim of the book is to equip readers with the ability to achieve better results with significantly less time, costs, effort and resources using the methods described here. The case studies presented in this book can be run on a regular desktop or notebook computer. No high-performance computing facilities are required. The idea for the book originated in a study conducted by Bartz & Bartz GmbH for the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis). Building on that study, the book is addressed to practitioners in industry as well as researchers, teachers and students in academia. The content focuses on the hyperparameter tuning of ML and DL algorithms, and is divided into two main parts: theory (Part I) and application (Part II). Essential topics covered include: a survey of important model parameters; four parameter tuning studies and one extensive global parameter tuning study; statistical analysis of the performance of ML and DL methods based on severity; and a new, consensus-ranking-based way to aggregate and analyze results from multiple algorithms. The book presents analyses of more than 30 hyperparameters from six relevant ML and DL methods, and provides source code so that users can reproduce the results. Accordingly, it serves as a handbook and textbook alike.

This open access book provides a wealth of hands-on examples that illustrate how hyperparameter tuning can be applied in practice and gives deep insights into the working mechanisms of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods. The aim of the book is to equip readers with the ability to achieve better results with significantly less time, costs, effort and resources using the methods described here. The case studies presented in this book can be run on a regular desktop or notebook computer. No high-performance computing facilities are required. The idea for the book originated in a study conducted by Bartz & Bartz GmbH for the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis). Building on that study, the book is addressed to practitioners in industry as well as researchers, teachers and students in academia. The content focuses on the hyperparameter tuning of ML and DL algorithms, and is divided into two main parts: theory (Part I) and application (Part II). Essential topics covered include: a survey of important model parameters; four parameter tuning studies and one extensive global parameter tuning study; statistical analysis of the performance of ML and DL methods based on severity; and a new, consensus-ranking-based way to aggregate and analyze results from multiple algorithms. The book presents analyses of more than 30 hyperparameters from six relevant ML and DL methods, and provides source code so that users can reproduce the results. Accordingly, it serves as a handbook and textbook alike.

Deep Learning with R introduces deep learning and neural networks using the R programming language. The book builds on the understanding of the theoretical and mathematical constructs and enables the reader to create applications on computer vision, natural language processing and transfer learning. The book starts with an introduction to machine learning and moves on to describe the basic architecture, different activation functions, forward propagation, cross-entropy loss and backward propagation of a simple neural network. It goes on to create different code segments to construct deep neural networks. It discusses in detail the initialization of network parameters, optimization techniques, and some of the common issues surrounding neural networks such as dealing with NaNs and the vanishing/exploding gradient problem. Advanced variants of multilayered perceptrons namely, convolutional neural networks and sequence models are explained, followed by application to different use cases. The book makes extensive use of the Keras and TensorFlow frameworks.

Hands-on Machine Learning with R provides a practical and applied approach to learning and developing intuition into today’s most popular machine learning methods. This book serves as a practitioner’s guide to the machine learning process and is meant to help the reader learn to apply the machine learning stack within R, which includes using various R packages such as glmnet, h2o, ranger, xgboost, keras, and others to effectively model and gain insight from their data. The book favors a hands-on approach, providing an intuitive understanding of machine learning concepts through concrete examples and just a little bit of theory. Throughout this book, the reader will be exposed to the entire machine learning process including feature engineering, resampling, hyperparameter tuning, model evaluation, and interpretation. The reader will be exposed to powerful algorithms such as regularized regression, random forests, gradient boosting machines, deep learning, generalized low rank models, and more! By favoring a hands-on approach and using real word data, the reader will gain an intuitive understanding of the architectures and engines that drive these algorithms and packages, understand when and how to tune the various hyperparameters, and be able to interpret model results. By the end of this book, the reader should have a firm grasp of R’s machine learning stack and be able to implement a systematic approach for producing high quality modeling results. Features: · Offers a practical and applied introduction to the most popular machine learning methods. · Topics covered include feature engineering, resampling, deep learning and more. · Uses a hands-on approach and real world data.

This open access book presents the first comprehensive overview of general methods in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), collects descriptions of existing systems based on these methods, and discusses the first series of international challenges of AutoML systems. The recent success of commercial ML applications and the rapid growth of the field has created a high demand for off-the-shelf ML methods that can be used easily and without expert knowledge. However, many of the recent machine learning successes crucially rely on human experts, who manually select appropriate ML architectures (deep learning architectures or more traditional ML workflows) and their hyperparameters. To overcome this problem, the field of AutoML targets a progressive automation of machine learning, based on principles from optimization and machine learning itself. This book serves as a point of entry into this quickly-developing field for researchers and advanced students alike, as well as providing a reference for practitioners aiming to use AutoML in their work.

Text data is important for many domains, from healthcare to marketing to the digital humanities, but specialized approaches are necessary to create features for machine learning from language. Supervised Machine Learning for Text Analysis in R explains how to preprocess text data for modeling, train models, and evaluate model performance using tools from the tidyverse and tidymodels ecosystem. Models like these can be used to make predictions for new observations, to understand what natural language features or characteristics contribute to differences in the output, and more. If you are already familiar with the basics of predictive modeling, use the comprehensive, detailed examples in this book to extend your skills to the domain of natural language processing. This book provides practical guidance and directly applicable knowledge for data scientists and analysts who want to integrate unstructured text data into their modeling pipelines. Learn how to use text data for both regression and classification tasks, and how to apply more straightforward algorithms like regularized regression or support vector machines as well as deep learning approaches. Natural language must be dramatically transformed to be ready for computation, so we explore typical text preprocessing and feature engineering steps like tokenization and word embeddings from the ground up. These steps influence model results in ways we can measure, both in terms of model metrics and other tangible consequences such as how fair or appropriate model results are.

A comprehensive resource that offers an introduction to statistics with a Bayesian angle, for students of professional disciplines like engineering and economics The Bayesian Way offers a basic introduction to statistics that emphasizes the Bayesian approach and is designed for use by those studying professional disciplines like engineering and economics. In addition to the Bayesian approach, the author includes the most common techniques of the frequentist approach. Throughout the text, the author covers statistics from a basic to a professional working level along with a practical understanding of the matter at hand. Filled with helpful illustrations, this comprehensive text explores a wide range of topics, starting with descriptive statistics, set theory, and combinatorics. The text then goes on to review fundamental probability theory and Bayes' theorem. The first part ends in an exposition of stochastic variables, exploring discrete, continuous and mixed probability distributions. In the second part, the book looks at statistical inference. Primarily Bayesian, but with the main frequentist techniques included, it covers conjugate priors through the powerful yet simple method of hyperparameters. It then goes on to topics in hypothesis testing (including utility functions), point and interval estimates (including frequentist confidence intervals), and linear regression. This book: Explains basic statistics concepts in accessible terms and uses an abundance of illustrations to enhance visual understanding Has guides for how to calculate the different probability distributions, functions , and statistical properties, on platforms like popular pocket calculators and Mathematica / Wolfram Alpha Includes example-proofs that enable the reader to follow the reasoning Contains assignments at different levels of difficulty from simply filling out the correct formula to the complex multi-step text assignments Offers information on continuous, discrete and mixed probability distributions, hypothesis testing, credible and confidence intervals, and linear regression Written for undergraduate and graduate students of subjects where Bayesian statistics are applied, including engineering, economics, and related fields, The Bayesian Way: With Applications in Engineering and Economics offers a clear understanding of Bayesian statistics that have real-world applications.