Python Machine Learning By Example - Second Edition

Avoiding overfitting with feature selection and dimensionality reduction

We typically represent data as a grid of numbers (a matrix). Each column represents a variable, which we call a feature in machine learning. In supervised learning, one of the variables is actually not a feature, but the label that we're trying to predict. And in supervised learning, each row is an example that we can use for training or testing.

The number of features corresponds to the dimensionality of the data. Our machine learning approach depends on the number of dimensions versus the number of examples. For instance, text and image data are very high dimensional, while stock market data has relatively fewer dimensions.

Fitting high-dimensional data is computationally ...