Tag Archives: machine learning
Feature Engineering in Machine Learning: Python Examples
Last updated: 3rd May, 2024 Have you ever wondered why some machine learning models perform exceptionally well while others don’t? Could the magic ingredient be something other than the algorithm itself? The answer is often “Yes,” and the magic ingredient is feature engineering. Good feature engineering can make or break a model. In this blog, we will demystify various techniques for feature engineering, including feature extraction, interaction features, encoding categorical variables, feature scaling, and feature selection. To demonstrate these methods, we’ll use a real-world dataset containing car sales data. This dataset includes a variety of features such as ‘Company Name’, ‘Model Name’, ‘Price’, ‘Model Year’, ‘Mileage’, and more. Through this …
Feature Selection vs Feature Extraction: Machine Learning
Last updated: 2nd May, 2024 The success of machine learning models often depends on the quality of the features used to train them. This is where the concepts of feature extraction and feature selection come in. In this blog post, we’ll explore the difference between feature selection and feature extraction, two key techniques used as part of feature engineering in machine learning to optimize feature sets for better model performance. Both feature selection and feature extraction are used for dimensionality reduction which is key to reducing model complexity given that higher model complexity often results in overfitting. We’ll provide examples of how they can be applied in real-world scenarios. If …
Model Selection by Evaluating Bias & Variance: Example
When working on a machine learning project, one of the key challenges faced by data scientists/machine learning engineers is to select the most appropriate model that generalizes well to unseen datasets. To achieve the best generalization on unseen data, the model’s bias and variance need to be balanced. In this post, we’ll explore how to visualize and interpret the trade-off between bias and variance using a residual error vs. model complexity plot. We’ll use a specific plot to guide our discussion. The following is the residual error vs model complexity plot that would need to be drawn for evaluating the model bias vs variance for model selection. We will learn …
Bias-Variance Trade-off in Machine Learning: Examples
Last updated: 1st May, 2024 The bias-variance trade-off is a fundamental concept in machine learning that presents a challenging dilemma for data scientists. It relates to the problem of simultaneously minimizing two sources of residual error that prevent supervised learning algorithms from generalizing beyond their training data. These two sources of error are related to Bias and Variance. Bias-related errors refer to the error due to overly simplistic machine learning models. Variance-related errors refer to the error due to too much complexity in the models. In this post, you will learn about the concepts of bias & variance in the machine learning (ML) models. You will learn about the tradeoff between bias …
Mean Squared Error vs Cross Entropy Loss Function
Last updated: 1st May, 2024 As a data scientist, understanding the nuances of various cost functions is critical for building high-performance machine learning models. Choosing the right cost function can significantly impact the performance of your model and determine how well it generalizes to unseen data. In this blog post, we will delve into two widely used cost functions: Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Cross Entropy Loss. By comparing their properties, applications, and trade-offs, we aim to provide you with a solid foundation for selecting the most suitable loss function for your specific problem. Cost functions play a pivotal role in training machine learning models as they quantify the difference …
Cross Entropy Loss Explained with Python Examples
Last updated: 1st May, 2024 In this post, you will learn the concepts related to the cross-entropy loss function along with Python code examples and which machine learning algorithms use the cross-entropy loss function as an objective function for training the models. Cross-entropy loss represents a loss function for models that predict the probability value as output (probability distribution as output). Logistic regression is one such algorithm whose output is a probability distribution. You may want to check out the details on how cross-entropy loss is related to information theory and entropy concepts – Information theory & machine learning: Concepts What’s Cross-Entropy Loss? Cross-entropy loss, also known as negative log-likelihood …
Gradient Descent in Machine Learning: Python Examples
Last updated: 22nd April, 2024 This post will teach you about the gradient descent algorithm and its importance in training machine learning models. For a data scientist, it is of utmost importance to get a good grasp on the concepts of gradient descent algorithm as it is widely used for optimizing/minimizing the objective function / loss function / cost function related to various machine learning models such as regression, neural network, etc. in terms of learning optimal weights/parameters. This algorithm is essential because it underpins many machine learning models, enabling them to learn from data by optimizing their performance. Introduction to Gradient Descent Algorithm The gradient descent algorithm is an optimization …
Self-Prediction vs Contrastive Learning: Examples
In the dynamic realm of AI, where labeled data is often scarce and costly, self-supervised learning helps unlock new machine learning use cases by harnessing the inherent structure of data for enhanced understanding without reliance on extensive labeled datasets as in the case of supervised learning. Simply speaking, self-supervised learning, at its core, is about teaching models to learn from the data itself, turning unlabeled data into a rich source of learning. There are two distinct methodologies used in self-supervised learning. They are the self-prediction method and contrastive learning method. In this blog, we will learn about their concepts and differences with the help of examples. What is the Self-Prediction …
Free IBM Data Sciences Courses on Coursera
In the rapidly evolving fields of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, staying ahead means continually learning and adapting. In this blog, there is a list of around 20 free data science-related courses from IBM available on coursera.org that can help data science enthusiasts master different domains in AI / Data Science / Machine Learning. This list includes courses related to the core technical skills and knowledge needed to excel in these innovative fields. Foundational Knowledge: Understanding the essence of Data Science lays the groundwork for a successful career in this field. A solid foundation helps you grasp complex concepts easily and contributes to better decision-making, problem-solving, and the capacity to …
Self-Supervised Learning vs Transfer Learning: Examples
Last updated: 3rd March, 2024 Understanding the difference between self-supervised learning and transfer learning, along with their practical applications, is crucial for any data scientist looking to optimize model performance and efficiency. Self-supervised learning and transfer learning are two pivotal techniques in machine learning, each with its unique approach to leveraging data for model training. Transfer learning capitalizes on a model pre-trained on a broad dataset with diverse categories, to serve as a foundational model for a more specialized task. his method relies on labeled data, often requiring significant human effort to label. Self-supervised learning, in contrast, pre-trains models using unlabeled data, creatively generating its labels from the inherent structure …
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) & LLM: Examples
Last updated: 26th Jan, 2024 Have you ever wondered how to seamlessly integrate the vast knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the specificity of domain-specific knowledge stored in file storage, image storage, vector databases, etc? As the world of machine learning continues to evolve, the need for more sophisticated and contextually relevant responses from LLMs becomes paramount. Lack of contextual knowledge can result in LLM hallucination thereby producing inaccurate, unsafe, and factually incorrect responses. This is where context augmentation with prompts, and, hence retrieval augmentated generation method, comes into the picture. For data scientists and product managers keen on deploying LLMs in production, the Retrieval Augmented Generation pattern offers …
Attention Mechanism in Transformers: Examples
Last updated: 1st Feb, 2024 The attention mechanism allows the model to focus on relevant words or phrases when performing NLP tasks such as translating a sentence or answering a question. It is a critical component in transformers, a type of neural network architecture used in NLP tasks such as those related to LLMs. In this blog, we will delve into different aspects of the attention mechanism (also called an attention head), common approaches (such as self-attention, cross attention, etc.) to calculating and implementing attention, and learn the concepts with the help of real-world examples. You can get good details in this book: Generative Deep Learning by David Foster. You …
NLP Tokenization in Machine Learning: Python Examples
Last updated: 1st Feb, 2024 Tokenization is a fundamental step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) where text is broken down into smaller units called tokens. These tokens can be words, characters, or subwords, and this process is crucial for preparing text data for further analysis like parsing or text generation. Tokenization plays a crucial role in training machine learning models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), and others. Tokenization is often the first step in preparing text data for machine learning. LLMs use tokenization as an essential data preprocessing step. Advanced tokenization techniques (like those used in BERT) allow …
Amazon (AWS) Machine Learning / AI Services List
Last updated: 30th Jan, 2024 Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that offers machine learning as one of its many services. AWS has been around for over 10 years and has helped data scientists leverage the Amazon AWS cloud to train machine learning models. AWS provides an easy-to-use interface that helps data scientists build, test, and deploy their machine learning models with ease. AWS also provides access to pre-trained machine learning models so you can start building your model without having to spend time training it first! You can get greater details on AWS machine learning services, data science use cases, and other aspects in this book – …
LLM Optimization for Inference – Techniques, Examples
One of the common challenges faced with the deployment of large language models (LLMs) while achieving low-latency completions (inferences) is the size of the LLMs. The size of LLM throws challenges in terms of compute, storage, and memory requirements. And, the solution to this is to optimize the LLM deployment by taking advantage of model compression techniques that aim to reduce the size of the model. In this blog, we will look into three different optimization techniques namely pruning, quantization, and distillation along with their examples. These techniques help model load quickly while enabling reduced latency during LLM inference. They reduce the resource requirements for the compute, storage, and memory. …
How is ChatGPT Trained to Generate Desired Responses?
Last updated: 27th Jan, 2024 Training an AI / Machine Learning model as sophisticated as the one used by ChatGPT involves a multi-step process that fine-tunes its ability to understand and generate human-like text. Let’s break down the ChatGPT training process into three primary steps. Note that OpenAI has not published any specific paper on this. However, the reference has been provided on this page – Introducing ChatGPT. Fine-tuning Base Model with Supervised Learning The first phase starts with collecting demonstration data. Here, prompts are taken from a dataset, and human labelers provide the desired output behavior, which essentially sets the standard for the AI’s responses. For example, if the …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me