Supervised Machine Learning: Classification

K Nearest Neighbors is a popular classification method because they are easy computation and easy to interpret. This module walks you through the theory behind k nearest neighbors as well as a demo for you to practice building k nearest neighbors models with sklearn.

This module will walk you through the main idea of how support vector machines construct hyperplanes to map your data into regions that concentrate a majority of data points of a certain class. Although support vector machines are widely used for regression, outlier detection, and classification, this module will focus on the latter.

Decision tree methods are a common baseline model for classification tasks due to their visual appeal and high interpretability. This module walks you through the theory behind decision trees and a few hands-on examples of building decision tree models for classification. You will realize the main pros and cons of these techniques. This background will be useful when you are presented with decision tree ensembles in the next module.

Ensemble models are a very popular technique as they can assist your models be more resistant to outliers and have better chances at generalizing with future data. They also gained popularity after several ensembles helped people win prediction competitions. Recently, stochastic gradient boosting became a go-to candidate model for many data scientists. This model walks you through the theory behind ensemble models and popular tree-based ensembles.

Some classification models are better suited than others to outliers, low occurrence of a class, or rare events. The most common methods to add robustness to a classifier are related to stratified sampling to re-balance the training data. This module will walk you through both stratified sampling methods and more novel approaches to model data sets with unbalanced classes.