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You're reading from  Mastering Predictive Analytics with scikit-learn and TensorFlow

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2018
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781789617740
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Alvaro Fuentes
Alvaro Fuentes
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Alvaro Fuentes

Alvaro Fuentes is a senior data scientist with a background in applied mathematics and economics. He has more than 14 years of experience in various analytical roles and is an analytics consultant at one of the ‘Big Three' global management consulting firms, leading advanced analytics projects in different industries like banking, technology, and consumer goods. Alvaro is also an author and trainer in analytics and data science and has published courses and books, such as 'Become a Python Data Analyst' and 'Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python'. He has also taught data science and related topics to thousands of students both on-site and online through different platforms such as Springboard, Simplilearn, Udemy, and BSG Institute, among others.
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Dimensionality reduction and PCA

The dimensionality reduction method is the process of reducing the number of features under consideration by obtaining a set of principal variables. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique is the most important technique used for dimensionality reduction. Here, we will talk about why we need dimensionality reduction, and we will also see how to perform the PCA technique in scikit-learn.

These are the reasons for having a high number of features while working on predictive analytics:

  • It enables the simplification of models, in order to make them easier to understand and to interpret. There might be some computational considerations if you are dealing with thousands of features. It might be a good idea to reduce the number of features in order to save computational resources.
  • Another reason is to avoid the "curse of dimensionality...
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Mastering Predictive Analytics with scikit-learn and TensorFlow
Published in: Sep 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789617740

Author (1)

author image
Alvaro Fuentes

Alvaro Fuentes is a senior data scientist with a background in applied mathematics and economics. He has more than 14 years of experience in various analytical roles and is an analytics consultant at one of the ‘Big Three' global management consulting firms, leading advanced analytics projects in different industries like banking, technology, and consumer goods. Alvaro is also an author and trainer in analytics and data science and has published courses and books, such as 'Become a Python Data Analyst' and 'Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python'. He has also taught data science and related topics to thousands of students both on-site and online through different platforms such as Springboard, Simplilearn, Udemy, and BSG Institute, among others.
Read more about Alvaro Fuentes