January 2017
Intermediate to advanced
218 pages
5h 10m
English
Content preview from Thoughtful Machine Learning with Python
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 5. Decision Trees and Random Forests
Every day we make decisions. Every second we make decisions. Our perceptive brains receive roughly 12.5 gigabytes to 2.5 terabytes of information per second—an impressive amount—but they only focus on 60 bits of information per second.1 Humans are exceptionally adept at taking in lots of data and quickly finding patterns in it.
But we’re not so great under pressure. In Chapter 1 we discussed flight and how checklists have solved many of its problems. We don’t use checklists because we’re stupid; on the contrary, it’s because under stress we forget small bits of information.
What if the effects of our decisions were even greater? Take, for instance, classifying mushrooms in the forest. If you are lucky enough to live in a climate that supports mushrooms such as morels, which are delicious, then you can see the allure of going to find your own, as they are quite expensive! But as we all know finding mushrooms in the forest is extremely dangerous if you misclassify them.
While death by mushroom is quite rare, the effects are well documented. Death caps, Amanita phalloides, cause liver failure. On the other hand, if you were to eat a Psilocybe semilanceata by accident, you would be in for a trip. Also known as liberty caps, these are the notorious magic mushrooms that people ingest to experience psychedelic effects!
While we as humans are good at processing information, we might not be the best at making decisions that are objective. When ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.