Machine Learning with Tree-Based Models in Python

Elie Kawerk

Elie is a data scientist with a background in computational quantum physics. His experience encompasses several industries including brick & mortar retail, e-commerce, entertainment, and finance. When not working, he likes to meditate, read about finance, algorithmic trading, and take care of his fitness.

Course Description

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.