# Free Online Data Science Training

Free Data Science Training Videos! Practical projects to improve your portfolio. Hints and tips to make you more productive. Training videos and more.

## 603: Nearest Neighbour Tips and Tricks

Jan 2018

Dimensionality and domain knowledge Is it right to use the same distance measure for all features? E.g. height and sex? CPU and Disk space? Some features will have more of an effect than others due to their scales. ??? In this version of the algorithm all features are used in the distance calculation. This treats all features the same. So a measure of height has the same effect as the measure of sex.

## 602: Nearest Neighbour Classification and Regression

Jan 2018

More than just similarities Classification: Predict the same class as the nearest observations Regression: Predict the same value as the nearest observations ??? Remember for classification tasks, we want to predict a class for a new observation. What we could do is predict a class that is the same as the nearest neighbour. Simple! For regression tasks, we need to predict a value. Again, we could use the value of the nearest neighbour!

## 601: Similarity and Nearest Neighbours

Jan 2018

This section introduces the idea of “similarity”. Why?: Simplicity Many business tasks require a measure of “similarity” Works well Business reasoning Why would businesses want to use a measure of similarity? What business problems map well to similarity classifiers? Find similar companies on a CRM Find similar people in an online dating app Find similar configurations of machines in a data centre Find pictures of cats that look like this cat Recommend products to buy from similar customers Find similar wines Similarity What is similarity?

## 503: Visualising Overfitting in High Dimensional Problems

Jan 2018

Validation curve One simple method of visualising overfitting is with a validation curve, (a.k.a fitting curve). This is a plot of a score (e.g. accuracy) verses some parameter in the model. Let’s compare the make_circles dataset again and vary the SVM->RBF->gamma value. ??? Performance of the SVM->RBF algorithm when altering the parameters of the RBF. We can see that we are underfitting at low values of $$\gamma$$. So we can make the model more complex by allowing the SVM to fit smaller and smaller kernels.

## 502: Preventing Overfitting with Holdout

Jan 2018

Holdout We have been using: Training data Not representative of production. We want to pretend like we are seeing new data: Hold back some data ??? When we train the model, we do so on some data. This is called training data. Up to now, we have been using the same training data to measure our accuracy. If we create a lookup table, our accuracy will be 100%.

## 501: Over and Underfitting

Jan 2018

Generalisation and overfitting “enough rope to hang yourself with” We can create classifiers that have a decision boundary of any shape. Very easy to overfit the data. This section is all about what overfitting is and why it is bad. ??? Speaking generally, we can create classifiers that correspond to any shape. We have so much flexibility that we could end up overfitting the data. This is where chance data, data that is noise, is considered a valid part of the model.

## 404: Nonlinear, Linear Classification

Jan 2018

Nonlinear functions Sometimes data cannot be separated by a simple threshold or linear boundary. We can also use nonlinear functions as a decision boundary. ??? To represent more complex data, we can introduce nonlinearities. Before we do, bear in mind: More complex interactions between features yield solutions that overfit data; to compensate we will need more data. More complex solutions take a greater amount of computational power Anti-KISS The simplest way of adding a nonlinearities is to add various permutations of the original features.

## 403: Linear Classification

Jan 2018

Classification via a model Decision trees created a one-dimensional decision boundary We could easily imagine using a linear model to define a decision boundary ??? Previously we used fixed decision boundaries to segment the data based upon how informative the segmentation would be. The decision boundary represents a one-dimensional rule that separates the data. We could easily increase the number or complexity of the parameters used to define the boundary.

## 402: Optimisation and Gradient Descent

Jan 2018

Optimisation When discussing regression we found that these have closed solutions. I.e. solutions that can be solved directly. For many other algorithms there is no closed solution available. In these cases we need to use an optimisation algorithm. The goals of these algorithms is to iteratively step towards the correct result. Gradient descent Given a cost function, the gradient decent algorithm calculates the gradient of the last step and move in the direction of that gradient.

## 401: Linear Regression

Jan 2018

Regression and Linear Classifiers Traditional linear regression (a.k.a. Ordinary Least Squares) is the simplest and classic form of regression. Given a linear model in the form of: \begin{align} f(\mathbf{x}) & = w_0 + w_1x_1 + w_2x_2 + \dots \\ & = \mathbf{w} ^T \cdot \mathbf{x} \end{align} Linear regression finds the parameters $$\mathbf{w}$$ that minimises the mean squared error (MSE)… The MSE is the sum of the squared values between the predicted value and the actual value.

## 302: How to Engineer Features

Jan 2018

Engineering features You want to do this because: Reduces the number of features without losing information Better features than the original Make data more suitable for training ??? Another part of the data wrangling challenge is to create better features from current ones. Distribution/Model specific rescaling Most models expect normally distributed data. If you can, transform the data to be normal. Infer the distribution from the histogram (and confirm by fitting distributions)

## 301: Data Engineering

Jan 2018

Your job depends on your data The goal of this section is to: Talk about what data is and the context provided by your domain Discover how to massage data to produce the best results Find out how and where we can discover new data ??? If you have inadequate data you will not be able to succeed in any data science task. More generally, I want you to focus on your data.

## 203: Examples and Decision Trees

Jan 2018

Example: Segmentation via Information Gain There’s a fairly famous dataset called the “mushroom dataset”. It describes whether mushrooms are edible or not, depending on an array of features. The nice thing about this dataset is that the features are all catagorical. So we can go through and segment the data for each value in a feature. This is some example data: poisonous cap-shape cap-surface cap-color bruises? p x s n t e x s y t e b s w t p x y w t e x s g f etc.

## 202: Segmentation For Classification

Jan 2018

Segmentation So let’s walk through a very visual, intuitive example to help describe what all data science algorithms are trying to do. This will seem quite complicated if you’ve never done anything like this before. That’s ok! I want to do this to show you that all algorithms that you’ve every heard of have some very basic assumption of what they are trying to do. At the end of this, we will have completely derived one very important type of classifier.

## 201: Basics and Terminology

Jan 2018

The ultimate goal First lets discuss what the goal is. What is the goal? The goal is to make a decision or a prediction Based upon what? Information How can we improve the quality of the decision or prediction? The quality of the solution is defined by the certainty represented by the information. Think about this for a moment. It’s a key insight. Think about your projects.

## 102: How to do a Data Science Project

Jan 2018

Problems in Data Science Understanding the problem “the five-whys” Different questions dramatically effect the tools and techniques used to solve the problem. Data Science as a Process More Science than Engineering High risk High reward Difficult Unpredictable By Kenneth Jensen CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Impacts of Data Science What is the purpose of the project?

## 101: Why Data Science?

Jan 2018

What is Data Science? Software Engineering, Maths, Automation, Data A.k.a: Machine Learning, AI, Big Data, etc. It’s current rise in popularity is due to more data and more computing power. For more information: https://winderresearch.com/what-is-data-science/ Examples US Supermarket Giants Target: Optimising Marketing using customer spending data. Walmart: Predicting demand ahead of a natural disaster. Discovery Most projects are “Discovery Projects”.