Python Machine Learning Cookbook

Building Conditional Random Fields for sequential text data

The Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are probabilistic models used to analyze structured data. They are frequently used to label and segment sequential data. CRFs are discriminative models as opposed to HMMs, which are generative models. CRFs are used extensively to analyze sequences, stocks, speech, words, and so on. In these models, given a particular labeled observation sequence, we define a conditional probability distribution over this sequence. This is in contrast with HMMs where we define a joint distribution over the label and the observed sequence.

Getting ready

HMMs assume that the current output is statistically independent of the previous outputs. This is needed by HMMs to ensure ...