Decision trees are supervised learning models used for problems involving classification and regression. Tree models present a high flexibility that comes at a price: on one hand, trees are able to capture complex non-linear relationships; on the other hand, they are prone to memorizing the noise present in a dataset. By aggregating the predictions of trees that are trained differently, ensemble methods take advantage of the flexibility of trees while reducing their tendency to memorize noise. Ensemble methods are used across a variety of fields and have a proven track record of winning many machine learning competitions.
In this course, you'll learn how to use Python to train decision trees and tree-based models with the user-friendly scikit-learn machine learning library. You'll understand the advantages and shortcomings of trees and demonstrate how ensembling can alleviate these shortcomings, all while practicing on real-world datasets. Finally, you'll also understand how to tune the most influential hyperparameters in order to get the most out of your models.

In this course, you'll learn how to use tree-based models and ensembles for regression and classification using scikit-learn. 

Machine Learning with Tree-Based Models in Python

A vital component of data science involves acquiring raw data and getting it into a form ready for analysis. It is commonly said that data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning and manipulating data, and only 20% of their time actually analyzing it. This course will equip you with all the skills you need to clean your data in Python, from learning how to diagnose problems in your data, to dealing with missing values and outliers. At the end of the course, you'll apply all of the techniques you've learned to a case study to clean a real-world Gapminder dataset.

This course will equip you with all the skills you need to clean your data in Python.

Data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning and manipulating data. This course will equip you with all the skills you need to clean your data in Python.

Cleaning Data in Python

Python is a general-purpose programming language that is becoming ever more popular for data science. Companies worldwide are using Python to harvest insights from their data and gain a competitive edge. Unlike other Python tutorials, this course focuses on Python specifically for data science. In our Introduction to Python course, you’ll learn about powerful ways to store and manipulate data, and helpful data science tools to begin conducting your own analyses. Start DataCamp’s online Python curriculum now.

Master the basics of data analysis in Python. Expand your skillset by learning scientific computing with NumPy.

Discover how to use Python for data science, learning about the ways to store and manipulate data in the environment to begin conducting your own analyses.

Introduction to Python

After all of the hard work of acquiring data and getting them into a form you can work with, you ultimately want to make clear, succinct conclusions from them. This crucial last step of a data analysis pipeline hinges on the principles of statistical inference. In this course, you will start building the foundation you need to think statistically, speak the language of your data, and understand what your data is telling you. The foundations of statistical thinking took decades to build, but can be grasped much faster today with the help of computers. With the power of Python-based tools, you will rapidly get up-to-speed and begin thinking statistically by the end of this course.

Build the foundation you need to think statistically and to speak the language of your data.

Statistical Thinking in Python (Part 1)

Machine learning is the field that teaches machines and computers to learn from existing data to make predictions on new data: Will a tumor be benign or malignant? Which of your customers will take their business elsewhere? Is a particular email spam? In this course, you'll learn how to use Python to perform supervised learning, an essential component of machine learning. You'll learn how to build predictive models, tune their parameters, and determine how well they will perform with unseen data—all while using real world datasets. You'll be using scikit-learn, one of the most popular and user-friendly machine learning libraries for Python.

Learn how to build and tune predictive models and evaluate how well they'll perform on unseen data.

Supervised Learning with scikit-learn

Say you have a collection of customers with a variety of characteristics such as age, location, and financial history, and you wish to discover patterns and sort them into clusters. Or perhaps you have a set of texts, such as Wikipedia pages, and you wish to segment them into categories based on their content. This is the world of unsupervised learning, called as such because you are not guiding, or supervising, the pattern discovery by some prediction task, but instead uncovering hidden structure from unlabeled data. Unsupervised learning encompasses a variety of techniques in machine learning, from clustering to dimension reduction to matrix factorization. In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of unsupervised learning and implement the essential algorithms using scikit-learn and SciPy. You will learn how to cluster, transform, visualize, and extract insights from unlabeled datasets, and end the course by building a recommender system to recommend popular musical artists.

Learn how to cluster, transform, visualize, and extract insights from unlabeled datasets using scikit-learn and scipy.

Unsupervised Learning in Python

Data science isn't just for predicting ad-clicks-it's also useful for social impact! This course is a case study from a machine learning competition on DrivenData. You'll explore a problem related to school district budgeting. By building a model to automatically classify items in a school's budget, it makes it easier and faster for schools to compare their spending with other schools. In this course, you'll begin by building a baseline model that is a simple, first-pass approach. In particular, you'll do some natural language processing to prepare the budgets for modeling. Next, you'll have the opportunity to try your own techniques and see how they compare to participants from the competition. Finally, you'll see how the winner was able to combine a number of expert techniques to build the most accurate model.

Learn how to build a model to automatically classify items in a school budget.

This course is a case study from a machine learning competition on DrivenData. Learn how to build a model to automatically classify items in a school budget.

Case Study: School Budgeting with Machine Learning in Python

You'll probably never have a time machine, but how about a machine for analyzing time? As soon as time enters any analysis, things can get weird. It's easy to get tripped up on day and month boundaries, time zones, daylight saving time, and all sorts of other things that can confuse the unprepared. If you're going to do any kind of analysis involving time, you’ll want to use Python to sort it out. Working with data sets on hurricanes and bike trips, we’ll cover counting events, figuring out how much time has elapsed between events and plotting data over time. You'll work in both standard Python and in Pandas, and we'll touch on the dateutil library, the only timezone library endorsed by the official Python documentation. After this course, you'll confidently handle date and time data in any format like a champion.

Learn how to work with dates and times in Python.

Learn how to work with dates and times in Python using Pandas and dateutil library. You'll also have chance to practice with real-world data as you learn.

Working With Dates and Times in Python

Working with Dates and Times in Python

How do we get from data to answers?  Exploratory data analysis is a process for exploring datasets, answering questions, and visualizing results.  This course presents the tools you need to clean and validate data, to visualize distributions and relationships between variables, and to use regression models to predict and explain.  You'll explore data related to demographics and health, including the National Survey of Family Growth and the General Social Survey.  But the methods you learn apply to all areas of science, engineering, and business. You'll use Pandas, a powerful library for working with data, and other core Python libraries including NumPy and SciPy, StatsModels for regression, and Matplotlib for visualization.  With these tools and skills, you will be prepared to work with real data, make discoveries, and present compelling results.

Learn how to explore, visualize, and extract insights from data. 

Learn with real-world examples how to clean, explore, visualize, and extract insights from data and use regression models to make predictions in Python.

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