
Meet Bharani Kumar de Puru, an industrial revolution 4.0 implementer and chief data scientist, sharing his LinkedIn profile and global leadership across firms for an engaging analytics and edtech session.
Prescriptive analytics uses what if scenarios to explore options and take actions based on predictions, such as increasing vaccines or awareness campaigns, or shutting down blower unit to prevent failures.
Explore practical data understanding through a real-time example, distinguishing nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio data with flight numbers, gate numbers, temperatures, and money.
Explore the scale of measurement across nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio data, learn the operations each type supports, and understand why ratio data enables the most comprehensive analysis.
Explain the difference between quantitative and qualitative data with numeric measures and qualitative observations, and show how structured, continuous, and count data guide decision making.
Differentiate structured tabular data from unstructured data like videos, images, audio, and text. Transform unstructured data into structured form via pixel values, mel frequency cepstral coefficient, and bag-of-words.
Explore end-to-end data collection with surveys by linking business reality to root cause analysis and research objectives, then translate constructs into time, strength, and constraint guided questions.
Define random variables by combining variability and probability, illustrate with coin flips and die rolls, and explain probability distribution and uppercase and lowercase notation.
Understand normal distribution as a continuous probability distribution with height or profit as the random variable. The curve's area equals one, and the probability of any exact value is zero.
Examine the three measures of central tendency—mean, median, and mode—and their role in first moment business decisions. Learn how outliers affect the mean, and when to use median or mode.
Learn how box plots distinguish percentiles, quartiles, and quantiles, including the first, second, and third quartiles and the minimum and maximum values.
Learn data cleansing with Python and pandas, using astype to typecast columns and fix data types such as object, integer, and float for effective preprocessing.
Ensemble techniques play a pivotal role in improving the accuracy and robustness of predictive models in data science. This intermediate-to-advanced level course is designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of ensemble methods and equip participants with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively apply ensemble techniques in real-world scenarios. Through a combination of theoretical concepts, practical implementation, and hands-on projects, participants will explore various ensemble methods and gain insights into their applications, strengths, and limitations.
Course Objectives:
1. Understand the Fundamentals of Ensemble Techniques:
- Gain an in-depth understanding of ensemble methods and their importance in data science.
- Learn about the intuition behind ensemble techniques and their advantages over individual models.
2. Study Bagging and Random Forest:
- Examine bagging as an ensemble technique, including its underlying principles and algorithmic implementation.
- Dive into Random Forest, a popular bagging-based ensemble method, and learn how it improves model performance.
3. Explore Boosting Algorithms:
- Learn about boosting algorithms, such as AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, and XGBoost, and their iterative nature.
- Understand the boosting process, including weak learner selection, weight adjustments, and error correction.
4. Master Stacking Techniques:
- Study the concept of stacking, also known as stacked generalization, and its role in combining multiple models.
- Explore various stacking architectures, including blending and meta-model approaches.
5. Model Aggregation and Voting:
- Discover different methods of aggregating ensemble predictions, such as majority voting and weighted voting.
- Explore advanced ensemble techniques like stacking with meta-features and stacking with model pruning.
6. Practical Implementation and Case Studies:
- Apply ensemble techniques to real-world datasets and problems.
- Work on hands-on projects to gain practical experience in implementing ensemble methods using Python/R and relevant libraries.
7. Advanced Topics and Recent Developments:
- Gain insights into advanced ensemble techniques, including gradient boosting variants like LightGBM and CATBoost.
- Explore recent research and developments in ensemble methods, such as deep learning ensembles.
8. Ethical Considerations and Best Practices:
- Discuss ethical considerations surrounding ensemble techniques, including biases, fairness, and interpretability.
- Learn best practices for applying ensemble techniques responsibly and effectively.
This course combines lectures, hands-on exercises, and practical projects to provide a comprehensive learning experience. Participants will have access to a dedicated online learning platform where they can access course materials, video lectures, and supplementary resources. Live sessions and discussion forums will foster interaction, collaboration, and the opportunity to seek clarification and guidance from instructors and peers. Participants will have the opportunity to work on real-world case studies and projects, applying ensemble techniques to solve data-driven problems and gain practical insights.
Assessment and Certification:
Participants will be assessed based on their performance in assignments, quizzes, and project submissions throughout the course. Successful completion of the course, including meeting the assessment criteria, will earn participants a certificate of completion. This certificate can be used to showcase their proficiency in ensemble techniques and their ability to apply them in practical settings.