34,79 €
This book teaches you to design and develop data mining applications using a variety of datasets, starting with basic classification and affinity analysis. This book covers a large number of libraries available in Python, including the Jupyter Notebook, pandas, scikit-learn, and NLTK.
You will gain hands on experience with complex data types including text, images, and graphs. You will also discover object detection using Deep Neural Networks, which is one of the big, difficult areas of machine learning right now.
With restructured examples and code samples updated for the latest edition of Python, each chapter of this book introduces you to new algorithms and techniques. By the end of the book, you will have great insights into using Python for data mining and understanding of the algorithms as well as implementations.
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First published: July 2015Second edition: April 2017
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Author
Robert Layton
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Robert Layton is a data scientist investigating data-driven applications to businesses across a number of sectors. He received a PhD investigating cybercrime analytics from the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory at Federation University Australia, before moving into industry, starting his own data analytics company dataPipeline (www.datapipeline.com.au). Next, he created Eureaktive (www.eureaktive.com.au), which works with tech-based startups on developing their proof-of-concepts and early-stage prototypes. Robert also runs www.learningtensorflow.com, which is one of the world's premier tutorial websites for Google's TensorFlow library.
Robert is an active member of the Python community, having used Python for more than 8 years. He has presented at PyConAU for the last four years and works with Python Charmers to provide Python-based training for businesses and professionals from a wide range of organisations.
Robert can be best reached via Twitter @robertlayton
Asad Ahamad is a data enthusiast and loves to work on data to solve challenging problems.
He did his masters in Industrial Mathematics with Computer Application from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He admires Mathematics a lot and always tries to use it to gain maximum profit for business.
He has good experience working on data mining, machine learning and data science and worked for various multinationals in India. He mainly uses R and Python to perform data wrangling and modeling. He is fond of using open source tools for data analysis.
He is active social media user. Feel free to connect him on twitter @asadtaj88
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Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the example code
Errata
Piracy
Questions
Getting Started with Data Mining
Introducing data mining
Using Python and the Jupyter Notebook
Installing Python
Installing Jupyter Notebook
Installing scikit-learn
A simple affinity analysis example
What is affinity analysis?
Product recommendations
Loading the dataset with NumPy
Downloading the example code
Implementing a simple ranking of rules
Ranking to find the best rules
A simple classification example
What is classification?
Loading and preparing the dataset
Implementing the OneR algorithm
Testing the algorithm
Summary
Classifying with scikit-learn Estimators
scikit-learn estimators
Nearest neighbors
Distance metrics
Loading the dataset
Moving towards a standard workflow
Running the algorithm
Setting parameters
Preprocessing
Standard pre-processing
Putting it all together
Pipelines
Summary
Predicting Sports Winners with Decision Trees
Loading the dataset
Collecting the data
Using pandas to load the dataset
Cleaning up the dataset
Extracting new features
Decision trees
Parameters in decision trees
Using decision trees
Sports outcome prediction
Putting it all together
Random forests
How do ensembles work?
Setting parameters in Random Forests
Applying random forests
Engineering new features
Summary
Recommending Movies Using Affinity Analysis
Affinity analysis
Algorithms for affinity analysis
Overall methodology
Dealing with the movie recommendation problem
Obtaining the dataset
Loading with pandas
Sparse data formats
Understanding the Apriori algorithm and its implementation
Looking into the basics of the Apriori algorithm
Implementing the Apriori algorithm
Extracting association rules
Evaluating the association rules
Summary
Features and scikit-learn Transformers
Feature extraction
Representing reality in models
Common feature patterns
Creating good features
Feature selection
Selecting the best individual features
Feature creation
Principal Component Analysis
Creating your own transformer
The transformer API
Implementing a Transformer
Unit testing
Putting it all together
Summary
Social Media Insight using Naive Bayes
Disambiguation
Downloading data from a social network
Loading and classifying the dataset
Creating a replicable dataset from Twitter
Text transformers
Bag-of-words models
n-gram features
Other text features
Naive Bayes
Understanding Bayes' theorem
Naive Bayes algorithm
How it works
Applying of Naive Bayes
Extracting word counts
Converting dictionaries to a matrix
Putting it all together
Evaluation using the F1-score
Getting useful features from models
Summary
Follow Recommendations Using Graph Mining
Loading the dataset
Classifying with an existing model
Getting follower information from Twitter
Building the network
Creating a graph
Creating a similarity graph
Finding subgraphs
Connected components
Optimizing criteria
Summary
Beating CAPTCHAs with Neural Networks
Artificial neural networks
An introduction to neural networks
Creating the dataset
Drawing basic CAPTCHAs
Splitting the image into individual letters
Creating a training dataset
Training and classifying
Back-propagation
Predicting words
Improving accuracy using a dictionary
Ranking mechanisms for word similarity
Putting it all together
Summary
Authorship Attribution
Attributing documents to authors
Applications and use cases
Authorship attribution
Getting the data
Using function words
Counting function words
Classifying with function words
Support Vector Machines
Classifying with SVMs
Kernels
Character n-grams
Extracting character n-grams
The Enron dataset
Accessing the Enron dataset
Creating a dataset loader
Putting it all together
Evaluation
Summary
Clustering News Articles
Trending topic discovery
Using a web API to get data
Reddit as a data source
Getting the data
Extracting text from arbitrary websites
Finding the stories in arbitrary websites
Extracting the content
Grouping news articles
The k-means algorithm
Evaluating the results
Extracting topic information from clusters
Using clustering algorithms as transformers
Clustering ensembles
Evidence accumulation
How it works
Implementation
Online learning
Implementation
Summary
Object Detection in Images using Deep Neural Networks
Object classification
Use cases
Application scenario
Deep neural networks
Intuition
Implementing deep neural networks
An Introduction to TensorFlow
Using Keras
Convolutional Neural Networks
GPU optimization
When to use GPUs for computation
Running our code on a GPU
Setting up the environment
Application
Getting the data
Creating the neural network
Putting it all together
Summary
Working with Big Data
Big data
Applications of big data
MapReduce
The intuition behind MapReduce
A word count example
Hadoop MapReduce
Applying MapReduce
Getting the data
Naive Bayes prediction
The mrjob package
Extracting the blog posts
Training Naive Bayes
Putting it all together
Training on Amazon's EMR infrastructure
Summary
Next Steps...
Getting Started with Data Mining
Scikit-learn tutorials
Extending the Jupyter Notebook
More datasets
Other Evaluation Metrics
More application ideas
Classifying with scikit-learn Estimators
Scalability with the nearest neighbor
More complex pipelines
Comparing classifiers
Automated Learning
Predicting Sports Winners with Decision Trees
More complex features
Dask
Research
Recommending Movies Using Affinity Analysis
New datasets
The Eclat algorithm
Collaborative Filtering
Extracting Features with Transformers
Adding noise
Vowpal Wabbit
word2vec
Social Media Insight Using Naive Bayes
Spam detection
Natural language processing and part-of-speech tagging
Discovering Accounts to Follow Using Graph Mining
More complex algorithms
NetworkX
Beating CAPTCHAs with Neural Networks
Better (worse?) CAPTCHAs
Deeper networks
Reinforcement learning
Authorship Attribution
Increasing the sample size
Blogs dataset
Local n-grams
Clustering News Articles
Clustering Evaluation
Temporal analysis
Real-time clusterings
Classifying Objects in Images Using Deep Learning
Mahotas
Magenta
Working with Big Data
Courses on Hadoop
Pydoop
Recommendation engine
W.I.L.L
More resources
Kaggle competitions
Coursera
The second revision of Learning Data Mining with Python was written with the programmer in mind. It aims to introduce data mining to a wide range of programmers, as I feel that this is critically important to all those in the computer science field. Data mining is quickly becoming the building block of the next generation of Artificial Intelligence systems. Even if you don't find yourself building these systems, you will be using them, interfacing with them, and being guided by them. Understand the process behind them is important and helps you get the best out of them. The second revision builds upon the first. Many of chapters and exercises are similar, although new concepts are introduced and exercises are expanded in scope. Those that had read the first revision should be able to move quickly through the book and pick up new knowledge along the way and engage with the extra activities proposed. Those new to the book are encouraged to take their time, do the exercises and experiment. Feel free to break the code to understand it, and reach out if you have any questions. As this is a book aimed at programmers, we assume that you have some knowledge of programming and of Python itself. For this reason, there is little explanation of what the Python code itself is doing, except in cases where it is ambiguous.
Chapter 1, Getting started with data mining, introduces the technologies we will be using, along with implementing two basic algorithms to get started.
Chapter 2, Classifying with scikit-learn, covers classification, a key form of data mining. You’ll also learn about some structures for making your data mining experimentation easier to perform..
Chapter 3, Predicting Sports Winners with Decisions Trees, introduces two new algorithms, Decision Trees and Random Forests, and uses it to predict sports winners by creating useful features..
Chapter 4, Recommending Movies using Affinity Analysis, looks at the problem of recommending products based on past experience, and introduces the Apriori algorithm.
Chapter 5, Features and scikit-learn Transformers, introduces more types of features you can create, and how to work with different datasets.
Chapter 6, Social Media Insight using Naive Bayes, uses the Naïve Bayes algorithm to automatically parse text-based information from the social media website Twitter.
Chapter 7, Follow Recommendations Using Graph Mining, applies cluster analysis and network analysis to find good people to follow on social media.
Chapter 8, Beating CAPTCHAs with Neural Networks, looks at extracting information from images, and then training neural networks to find words and letters in those images.
Chapter 9, Authorship attribution, looks at determining who wrote a given documents, by extracting text-based features and using Support Vector Machines.
Chapter 10, Clustering news articles, uses the k-means clustering algorithm to group together news articles based on their content.
Chapter 11,Object Detection in Images using Deep Neural Networks, determines what type of object is being shown in an image, by applying deep neural networks.
Chapter 12, Working with Big Data, looks at workflows for applying algorithms to big data and how to get insight from it.
Appendix, Next step, goes through each chapter, giving hints on where to go next for a deeper understanding of the concepts introduced.
It should come as no surprise that you’ll need a computer, or access to one, to complete the book. The computer should be reasonably modern, but it doesn’t need to be overpowered. Any modern processor (from about 2010 onwards) and 4 gigabytes of RAM will suffice, and you can probably run almost all of the code on a slower system too.
The exception here is with the final two chapters. In these chapters, I step through using Amazon’s web services (AWS) for running the code. This will probably cost you some money, but the advantage is less system setup than running the code locally. If you don’t want to pay for those services, the tools used can all be set-up on a local computer, but you will definitely need a modern system to run it. A processor built in at least 2012, and more than 4 GB of RAM are necessary.
I recommend the Ubuntu operating system, but the code should work well on Windows, Macs, or any other Linux variant. You may need to consult the documentation for your system to get some things installed though.
In this book, I use pip for installing code, which is a command line tool for installing Python libraries. Another option is to use Anaconda, which can be found online here: http://continuum.io/downloads
I also have tested all code using Python 3. Most of the code examples work on Python 2 with no changes. If you run into any problems, and can’t get around it, send an email and we can offer a solution.
This book is for programmers that want to get started in data mining in an application-focused manner.
If you haven’t programmed before, I strongly recommend that you learn at least the basics before you get started. This book doesn’t introduce programming, nor does it give too much time to explaining the actual implementation (in-code) of how to type out the instructions. That said, once you go through the basics, you should be able to come back to this book fairly quickly – there is no need to be an expert programmer first!
I highly recommend that you have some Python programming experience. If you don’t, feel free to jump in, but you might want to take a look at some Python code first, possibly focused on tutorials using the IPython notebook. Writing programs in the IPython notebook works a little differently than other methods, such as writing a Java program in a fully-fledged IDE.
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We are collecting information about our world on a scale that has never been seen before in the history of humanity. Along with this trend, we are now placing more day-to-day importance on the use of this information in everyday life. We now expect our computers to translate web pages into other languages, predict the weather with high accuracy, suggest books we would like, and to diagnose our health issues. These expectations will grow into the future, both in application breadth and efficacy. Data Mining is a methodology that we can employ to train computers to make decisions with data and forms the backbone of many high-tech systems of today.
The Python programming language is fast growing in popularity, for a good reason. It gives the programmer flexibility, it has many modules to perform different tasks, and Python code is usually more readable and concise than in any other languages. There is a large and an active community of researchers, practitioners, and beginners using Python for data mining.
In this chapter, we will introduce data mining with Python. We will cover the following topics
What is data mining and where can we use it?
Setting up a Python-based environment to perform data mining
An example of affinity analysis, recommending products based on purchasing habits
An example of (a classic) classification problem, predicting the plant species based on its measurement
Data mining provides a way for a computer to learn how to make decisions with data. This decision could be predicting tomorrow's weather, blocking a spam email from entering your inbox, detecting the language of a website, or finding a new romance on a dating site. There are many different applications of data mining, with new applications being discovered all the time.
Most data mining applications work with the same high-level view, where a model learns from some data and is applied to other data, although the details often change quite considerably.
Data mining applications involve creating data sets and tuning the algorithm as explained in the following steps
We start our data mining process by creating a dataset, describing an aspect of the real world. Datasets comprise of the following two aspects:
The next step is tuning the data mining algorithm. Each data mining algorithm has parameters, either within the algorithm or supplied by the user. This tuning allows the algorithm to learn how to make decisions about the data.
As a simple example, we may wish the computer to be able to categorize people as short or tall. We start by collecting our dataset, which includes the heights of different people and whether they are considered short or tall:
Person
Height
Short or tall?
1
155cm
Short
2
165cm
Short
3
175cm
Tall
4
185cm
Tall
As explained above, the next step involves tuning the parameters of our algorithm. As a simple algorithm; if the height is more than x, the person is tall. Otherwise, they are short. Our training algorithms will then look at the data and decide on a good value for x. For the preceding data, a reasonable value for this threshold would be 170 cm. A person taller than 170 cm is considered tall by the algorithm. Anyone else is considered short by this measure. This then lets our algorithm classify new data, such as a person with height 167 cm, even though we may have never seen a person with those measurements before.
In the preceding data, we had an obvious feature type. We wanted to know if people are short or tall, so we collected their heights. This feature engineering is a critical problem in data mining. In later chapters, we will discuss methods for choosing good features to collect in your dataset. Ultimately, this step often requires some expert domain knowledge or at least some trial and error.
In this book, we will introduce data mining through Python. In some cases, we choose clarity of code and workflows, rather than the most optimized way to perform every task. This clarity sometimes involves skipping some details that can improve the algorithm's speed or effectiveness.
In this section, we will cover installing Python and the environment that we will use for most of the book, the Jupyter Notebook. Furthermore, we will install the NumPy module, which we will use for the first set of examples.
The Python programming language is a fantastic, versatile, and an easy to use language.
For this book, we will be using Python 3.5, which is available for your system from the Python Organization's website https://www.python.org/downloads/. However, I recommend that you use Anaconda to install Python, which you can download from the official website at https://www.continuum.io/downloads.
In this book, I assume that you have some knowledge of programming and Python itself. You do not need to be an expert with Python to complete this book, although a good level of knowledge will help. I will not be explaining general code structures and syntax in this book, except where it is different from what is considered normal python coding practice.
If you do not have any experience with programming, I recommend that you pick up the Learning Python book from Packt Publishing, or the book Dive Into Python, available online at www.diveintopython3.net
The Python organization also maintains a list of two online tutorials for those new to Python:
For non-programmers who want to learn to program through the Python language:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers
For programmers who already know how to program, but need to learn Python specifically:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers Windows users will need to set an environment variable to use Python from the command line, where other systems will usually be immediately executable. We set it in the following steps
First, find where you install Python 3 onto your computer; the default location is
C:\Python35
.
Next, enter this command into the command line (cmd program): set the environment to
PYTHONPATH=%PYTHONPATH%;C:\Python35
.
Once you have Python running on your system, you should be able to open a command prompt and can run the following code to be sure it has installed correctly.
$ python Python 3.5.1 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11) [GCC 4.8.2] on Linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> print("Hello, world!")
Hello, world!
>>> exit()
Note that we will be using the dollar sign ($) to denote that a command that you type into the terminal (also called a shell or cmd on Windows). You do not need to type this character (or retype anything that already appears on your screen). Just type in the rest of the line and press Enter.
After you have the above "Hello, world!" example running, exit the program and move on to installing a more advanced environment to run Python code, the Jupyter Notebook.
Jupyter is a platform for Python development that contains some tools and environments for running Python and has more features than the standard interpreter. It contains the powerful Jupyter Notebook, which allows you to write programs in a web browser. It also formats your code, shows output, and allows you to annotate your scripts. It is a great tool for exploring datasets and we will be using it as our main environment for the code in this book.
To install the Jupyter Notebook on your computer, you can type the following into a command line prompt (not into Python):
$ conda install jupyter notebook
You will not need administrator privileges to install this, as Anaconda keeps packages in the user's directory.
With the Jupyter Notebook installed, you can launch it with the following:
$ jupyter notebook
Running this command will do two things. First, it will create a Jupyter Notebook instance - the backend - that will run in the command prompt you just used. Second, it will launch your web browser and connect to this instance, allowing you to create a new notebook. It will look something like the following screenshot (where you need to replace /home/bob with your current working directory):
To stop the Jupyter Notebook from running, open the command prompt that has the instance running (the one you used earlier to run the jupyter notebook command). Then, press Ctrl + C and you will be prompted Shutdown this notebook server (y/[n])?. Type y and press Enter and the Jupyter Notebook will shut down.
The scikit-learn package is a machine learning library, written in Python (but also containing code in other languages). It contains numerous algorithms, datasets, utilities, and frameworks for performing machine learning. Scikit-learnis built upon the scientific python stack, including libraries such as the NumPy and SciPy for speed. Scikit-learn is fast and scalable in many instances and useful for all skill ranges from beginners to advanced research users. We will cover more details of scikit-learn in Chapter 2, Classifying with scikit-learn Estimators.
To install scikit-learn, you can use the conda utility that comes with Python 3, which will also install the NumPy and SciPy libraries if you do not already have them. Open a terminal with administrator/root privileges and enter the following command:
$ conda install scikit-learn
Users of major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Red Hat may wish to install the official package from their package manager.
Those wishing to install the latest version by compiling the source, or view more detailed installation instructions, can go to http://scikit-learn.org/stable/install.html and refer the official documentation on installing scikit-learn.
In this section, we jump into our first example. A common use case for data mining is to improve sales, by asking a customer who is buying a product if he/she would like another similar product as well. You can perform this analysis through affinity analysis, which is the study of when things exist together, namely. correlate to each other.
To repeat the now-infamous phrase taught in statistics classes, correlation is not causation. This phrase means that the results from affinity analysis cannot give a cause. In our next example, we perform affinity analysis on product purchases. The results indicate that the products are purchased together, but not that buying one product causes the purchase of the other. The distinction is important, critically so when determining how to use the results to affect a business process, for instance.
Affinity analysis is a type of data mining that gives similarity between samples (objects). This could be the similarity between the following:
Users
on a website, to provide varied services or targeted advertising
Items
to sell to those users, to provide recommended movies or products
Human genes
, to find people that share the same ancestors
We can measure affinity in several ways. For instance, we can record how frequently two products are purchased together. We can also record the accuracy of the statement when a person buys object 1 and when they buy object 2. Other ways to measure affinity include computing the similarity between samples, which we will cover in later chapters.
One of the issues with moving a traditional business online, such as commerce, is that tasks that used to be done by humans need to be automated for the online business to scale and compete with existing automated businesses. One example of this is up-selling, or selling an extra item to a customer who is already buying. Automated product recommendations through data mining are one of the driving forces behind the e-commerce revolution that is turning billions of dollars per year into revenue.
In this example, we are going to focus on a basic product recommendation service. We design this based on the following idea: when two items are historically purchased together, they are more likely to be purchased together in the future. This sort of thinking is behind many product recommendation services, in both online and offline businesses.
A very simple algorithm for this type of product recommendation algorithm is to simply find any historical case where a user has brought an item and to recommend other items that the historical user brought. In practice, simple algorithms such as this can do well, at least better than choosing random items to recommend. However, they can be improved upon significantly, which is where data mining comes in.
To simplify the coding, we will consider only two items at a time. As an example, people may buy bread and milk at the same time at the supermarket. In this early example, we wish to find simple rules of the form:
If a person buys product X, then they are likely to purchase product Y
More complex rules involving multiple items will not be covered such as people buying sausages and burgers being more likely to buy tomato sauce.
In the affinity analysis example, we looked for correlations between different variables in our dataset. In classification, we have a single variable that we are interested in and that we call the class (also called the target). In the earlier example, if we were interested in how to make people buy more apples, we would explore the rules related to apples and use those to inform our decisions.
Classification is one of the largest uses of data mining, both in practical use and in research. As before, we have a set of samples that represents objects or things we are interested in classifying. We also have a new array, the class values. These class values give us a categorization of the samples. Some examples are as follows:
Determining the species of a plant by looking at its measurements. The class value here would be:
Which species is this?
Determining if an image contains a dog. The class would be:
Is there a dog in this image?
Determining if a patient has cancer, based on the results of a specific test. The class would be:
Does this patient have cancer?
While many of the examples previous are binary (yes/no) questions, they do not have to be, as in the case of plant species classification in this section.
OneR is a simple algorithm that simply predicts the class of a sample by finding the most frequent class for the feature values. OneR is shorthand for One Rule, indicating we only use a single rule for this classification by choosing the feature with the best performance. While some of the later algorithms are significantly more complex, this simple algorithm has been shown to have good performance in some real-world datasets.