Python Machine Learning By Example

Best practice 13 - choose the right algorithm(s) to start with

Due to the fact that there are several parameters to tune for an algorithm, exhausting all algorithms and fine-tuning each one can be extremely time-consuming and computationally expensive. We should instead short-list one to three algorithms to start with following the general guidelines in the following list (note we herein focus on classification, but the theory transcends in regression and there is usually a counterpart algorithm in regression).

There are several things that we need to be clear about before short-listing potential algorithms:

• Size of the training dataset
• Dimensionality of the dataset
• Whether the data is linearly separable
• Whether features are independent ...