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219k views

K-Means clustering for mixed numeric and categorical data

My data set contains a number of numeric attributes and one categorical. Say, NumericAttr1, NumericAttr2, ..., NumericAttrN, CategoricalAttr, where ...
6k views

How to set the number of neurons and layers in neural networks

I am a beginner to neural networks and have had trouble grasping two concepts: How does one decide the number of middle layers a given neural network have? 1 vs. 10 or whatever. How does one decide ...
264k views

How to get correlation between two categorical variable and a categorical variable and continuous variable?

I am building a regression model and I need to calculate the below to check for correlations Correlation between 2 Multi level categorical variables Correlation between a Multi level categorical ...
37k views

Does gradient descent always converge to an optimum?

I am wondering whether there is any scenario in which gradient descent does not converge to a minimum. I am aware that gradient descent is not always guaranteed to converge to a global optimum. I am ...
11k views

Why do convolutional neural networks work?

I have often heard people saying that why convolutional neural networks are still poorly understood. Is it known why convolutional neural networks always end up learning increasingly sophisticated ...
256k views

How to set class weights for imbalanced classes in Keras?

I know that there is a possibility in Keras with the class_weights parameter dictionary at fitting, but I couldn't find any example. Would somebody so kind to ...
30k views

Publicly Available Datasets

One of the common problems in data science is gathering data from various sources in a somehow cleaned (semi-structured) format and combining metrics from various sources for making a higher level ...
222k views

What are deconvolutional layers?

I recently read Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation by Jonathan Long, Evan Shelhamer, Trevor Darrell. I don't understand what "deconvolutional layers" do / how they work. The ...
204k views

Micro Average vs Macro average Performance in a Multiclass classification setting

I am trying out a multiclass classification setting with 3 classes. The class distribution is skewed with most of the data falling in 1 of the 3 classes. (class labels being 1,2,3, with 67.28% of the ...
3k views

Obtaining consistent one-hot encoding of train / production data

I'm building an app that will require user input. Currently, on the training set, I run the following code, in which data is a pandas dataframe with a combination ...
95k views

What is the “dying ReLU” problem in neural networks?

Referring to the Stanford course notes on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, a paragraph says: "Unfortunately, ReLU units can be fragile during training and can "die". For ...
79k views

Open source Anomaly Detection in Python

Problem Background: I am working on a project that involves log files similar to those found in the IT monitoring space (to my best understanding of IT space). These log files are time-series data, ...
7k views

What would I prefer - an over-fitted model or a less accurate model?

Let's say we have two models trained. And let's say we are looking for good accuracy. The first has an accuracy of 100% on training set and 84% on test set. Clearly over-fitted. The second has an ...
259k views

What's the difference between fit and fit_transform in scikit-learn models?

I'm a newbie to data science, and I do not understand the difference between the fit and fit_transform methods in scikit-learn. ...
33k views

Adding Features To Time Series Model LSTM

have been reading up a bit on LSTM's and their use for time series and its been interesting but difficult at the same time. One thing I have had difficulties with understanding is the approach to ...
54k views

Why mini batch size is better than one single “batch” with all training data?

I often read that in case of Deep Learning models the usual practice is to apply mini batches (generally a small one, 32/64) over several training epochs. I cannot really fathom the reason behind this....
13k views

Should I go for a 'balanced' dataset or a 'representative' dataset?

My 'machine learning' task is of separating benign Internet traffic from malicious traffic. In the real world scenario, most (say 90% or more) of Internet traffic is benign. Thus I felt that I should ...
13k views

How to feed LSTM with different input array sizes?

If I like to write a LSTM network and feed it by different input array sizes, how is it possible? For example I want to get voice messages or text messages in a ...
18k views

Multi-dimentional and multivariate Time-Series forecast (RNN/LSTM) Keras

I have been trying to understand how to represent and shape data to make a multidimentional and multivariate time series forecast using Keras (or TensorFlow) but I am still very unclear after reading ...
20k views

How is a splitting point chosen for continuous variables in decision trees?

I have two questions related to decision trees: If we have a continuous attribute, how do we choose the splitting value? Example: Age=(20,29,50,40....) Imagine that we have a continuous attribute $f$...
209 views

Why you shouldn't upsample before cross validation

I have an imbalanced dataset and I am trying different methods to address the data imbalance. I found this article that explains the correct way to cross validate when oversampling data using SMOTE ...
82k views

When to use One Hot Encoding vs LabelEncoder vs DictVectorizor?

I have been building models with categorical data for a while now and when in this situation I basically default to using scikit-learn's LabelEncoder function to transform this data prior to building ...
154k views

The cross-entropy error function in neural networks

In the MNIST For ML Beginners they define cross-entropy as $$H_{y'} (y) := - \sum_{i} y_{i}' \log (y_i)$$ $y_i$ is the predicted probability value for class $i$ and $y_i'$ is the true probability ...
9k views

Tools and protocol for reproducible data science using Python

I am working on a data science project using Python. The project has several stages. Each stage comprises of taking a data set, using Python scripts, auxiliary data, configuration and parameters, and ...
56k views

In supervised learning, why is it bad to have correlated features?

I read somewhere that if we have features that are too correlated, we have to remove one, as this may worsen the model. It is clear that correlated features means that they bring the same information, ...
52k views

Why should the data be shuffled for machine learning tasks

In machine learning tasks it is common to shuffle data and normalize it. The purpose of normalization is clear (for having same range of feature values). But, after struggling a lot, I did not find ...
14k views

Quick guide into training highly imbalanced data sets

I have a classification problem with approximately 1000 positive and 10000 negative samples in training set. So this data set is quite unbalanced. Plain random forest is just trying to mark all test ...
266k views

ValueError: Input contains NaN, infinity or a value too large for dtype('float32')

I got ValueError when predicting test data using a RandomForest model. My code: ...
6k views

Starting my career as Data Scientist, is Software Engineering experience required? [closed]

I am an MSc student at the University of Edinburgh, specialized in machine learning and natural language processing. I had some practical courses focused on data mining, and others dealing with ...
3k views

Why decision tree needs categorical variable to be encoded?

As per my intuition, decision trees should work better with categorical variables than with continuous variables. If this is the case, why is encoding needed on categorical variables? Can someone give ...
114k views

When should I use Gini Impurity as opposed to Information Gain (Entropy)?

Can someone practically explain the rationale behind Gini impurity vs Information gain (based on Entropy)? Which metric is better to use in different scenarios while using decision trees?
76k views

Training an RNN with examples of different lengths in Keras

I am trying to get started learning about RNNs and I'm using Keras. I understand the basic premise of vanilla RNN and LSTM layers, but I'm having trouble understanding a certain technical point for ...
52k views

Number of parameters in an LSTM model

How many parameters does a single stacked LSTM have? The number of parameters imposes a lower bound on the number of training examples required and also influences the training time. Hence knowing the ...
43k views

Data Science Project Ideas [closed]

I don't know if this is a right place to ask this question, but a community dedicated to Data Science should be the most appropriate place in my opinion. I have just started with Data Science and ...
8k views

Role derivative of sigmoid function in neural networks

I try to understand role of derivative of sigmoid function in neural networks. First I plot sigmoid function, and derivative of all points from definition using python. What is the role of this ...
33k views

Should we apply normalization to test data as well?

I am doing a project on author identification problem. I had applied the tf-idf normalization to train data and then trained a svm on that data. Now when using the classifier should I normalize test ...
14k views

Is it always better to use the whole dataset to train the final model?

A common technique after training, validating and testing the Machine Learning model of preference is to use the complete dataset, including the testing subset, to train a final model to deploy it on, ...
13k views

How to Predict the future values of time horizon with Keras?

I just built this LSTM neural network with Keras ...
5k views

How to give name to topics created using LDA?

I have categorized 800,000 documents into 500 categories using the Mahout topic modelling. Instead of representing the topic using the top 5/10 words for each topics, I want to infer a generic name ...
15k views

How do you apply SMOTE on text classification?

Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is an oversampling technique used in an imbalanced dataset problem. So far I have an idea how to apply it on generic, structured data. But is it ...
6k views

L1 & L2 Regularization in Light GBM

This question pertains to L1 & L2 regularization parameters in Light GBM. As per official documentation: reg_alpha (float, optional (default=0.)) – L1 ...
4k views

Does MLP always find local minimum

In linear regression we use the following cost function which is a convex function: We Use the following cost function in ...
13k views

How to plot logistic regression decision boundary?

I am running logistic regression on a small dataset which looks like this: After implementing gradient descent and the cost function, I am getting a 100% accuracy in the prediction stage, However I ...
55k views

Machine learning - features engineering from date/time data

What are the common/best practices to handle time data for machine learning application? For example, if in data set there is a column with timestamp of event, such as "2014-05-05", how you can ...
19k views

What is the difference between “equivariant to translation” and “invariant to translation”

I'm having trouble understanding the difference between equivariant to translation and invariant to translation. In the book Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016 (I. Goodfellow, A. Courville, and Y. Bengio)...
42k views

How to interpret the output of XGBoost importance?

I ran a xgboost model. I don't exactly know how to interpret the output of xgb.importance. What is the meaning of Gain, Cover, and Frequency and how do we ...
8k views

Is the R language suitable for Big Data

R has many libraries which are aimed at Data Analysis (e.g. JAGS, BUGS, ARULES etc..), and is mentioned in popular textbooks such as: J.Krusche, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis; B.Lantz, "Machine ...
4k views

How to self-learn data science? [closed]

I am a self-taught web developer and am interested in teaching myself data science, but I'm unsure of how to begin. In particular, I'm wondering: What fields are there within data science? (e.g., ...