Workflow of a Machine Learning Project

In this blog, we will discuss the workflow of a Machine learning project this includes all the
steps required to build the proper machine learning project from scratch.

We will also go over data pre-processing, data cleaning, feature exploration and feature
engineering and show the impact that it has on Machine Learning Model Performance. We
will also cover a couple of the pre-modelling steps that can help to improve the model
performance.

Python Libraries that would be need to achieve the task:

1. Numpy
2. Pandas
3. Sci-kit Learn
4. Matplotlib

Overview of the Workflow of ML

We can define the machine learning workflow in 3 stages.

1. Gathering data
2. Data pre-processing
3. Researching the model that will be best for the type of data
4. Training and testing the model
5. Evaluation
Okay but first let’s start from the basics

What is the machine learning Model?

The machine learning model is nothing but a piece of code; an engineer or data scientist
makes it smart through training with data. So, if you give garbage to the model, you will get
garbage in return, i.e. the trained model will provide false or wrong predictions.

The process of gathering data depends on the type of project we desire to make, if we want to
make an ML project that uses real-time data, then we can build an IoT system that using
different sensors data. The data set can be collected from various sources such as a file,
database, sensor and many other such sources but the collected data cannot be used directly
for performing the analysis process as there might be a lot of missing data, extremely large
values, unorganized text data or noisy data. Therefore, to solve this problem Data Preparation
is done.

We can also use some free data sets which are present on the internet. Kaggle and UCI
Machine learning Repository are the repositories that are used the most for making
Machine learning models. Kaggle is one of the most visited websites that is used for
practicing machine learning algorithms, they also host competitions in which people can
participate and get to test their knowledge of machine learning.

Data pre-processing is one of the most important steps in machine learning. It is the most
important step that helps in building machine learning models more accurately. In machine
learning, there is an 80/20 rule. Every data scientist should spend 80% time for data pre-
processing and 20% time to actually perform the analysis.

What is data pre-processing?

Data pre-processing is a process of cleaning the raw data i.e. the data is collected in the real
world and is converted to a clean data set. In other words, whenever the data is gathered from
different sources it is collected in a raw format and this data isn’t feasible for the analysis.
Therefore, certain steps are executed to convert the data into a small clean data set, this part
of the process is called as data pre-processing.

Why do we need it?

As we know that data pre-processing is a process of cleaning the raw data into clean data, so
that can be used to train the model. So, we definitely need data pre-processing to achieve
good results from the applied model in machine learning and deep learning projects.

Most of the real-world data is messy, some of these types of data are:

1. Missing data: Missing data can be found when it is not continuously created or due to
technical issues in the application (IOT system).

2. Noisy data: This type of data is also called outliners, this can occur due to human errors
(human manually gathering the data) or some technical problem of the device at the time of
collection of data.

3. Inconsistent data: This type of data might be collected due to human errors (mistakes
with the name or values) or duplication of data.

Three Types of Data

1. Numeric e.g. income, age

2. Categorical e.g. gender, nationality

3. Ordinal e.g. low/medium/high

How can data pre-processing be performed?

These are some of the basic pre — processing techniques that can be used to convert raw
data.

1. Conversion of data: As we know that Machine Learning models can only handle numeric
features, hence categorical and ordinal data must be somehow converted into numeric
features.

2. Ignoring the missing values: Whenever we encounter missing data in the data set then we
can remove the row or column of data depending on our need. This method is known to be
efficient but it shouldn’t be performed if there are a lot of missing values in the dataset.

3. Filling the missing values: Whenever we encounter missing data in the data set then we
can fill the missing data manually, most commonly the mean, median or highest frequency
value is used.

4. Machine learning: If we have some missing data then we can predict what data shall be
present at the empty position by using the existing data.
5. Outliers detection: There are some error data that might be present in our data set that
deviates drastically from other observations in a data set. [Example: human weight = 800 Kg;
due to mistyping of extra 0]

Our main goal is to train the best performing model possible, using the pre-processed data.

Supervised Learning:
In Supervised learning, an AI system is presented with data which is labelled, which means
that each data tagged with the correct label.

The supervised learning is categorized into 2 other categories which are “Classification” and
“Regression”.

Classification:
Classification problem is when the target variable is categorical (i.e. the output could be
classified into classes — it belongs to either Class A or B or something else).

A classification problem is when the output variable is a category, such as “red” or “blue” ,
“disease” or “no disease” or “spam” or “not spam”.
Classification | GIF: www.cs.toronto.edu

As shown in the above representation, we have 2 classes which are plotted on the graph i.e.
red and blue which can be represented as ‘setosa flower’ and ‘versicolor flower’, we can
image the X-axis as ther ‘Sepal Width’ and the Y-axis as the ‘Sepal Length’, so we try to
create the best fit line that separates both classes of flowers.

These some most used classification algorithms.

 K-Nearest Neighbor
 Naive Bayes
 Decision Trees/Random Forest
 Support Vector Machine
 Logistic Regression

Regression:
While a Regression problem is when the target variable is continuous (i.e. the output is
numeric).
Regression | GIF: techburst.io

As shown in the above representation, we can imagine that the graph’s X-axis is the ‘Test
scores’ and the Y-axis represents ‘IQ’. So we try to create the best fit line in the given graph
so that we can use that line to predict any approximate IQ that isn’t present in the given data.

These some most used regression algorithms.

 Linear Regression
 Support Vector Regression
 Decision Tress/Random Forest
 Gaussian Progresses Regression
 Ensemble Methods

Unsupervised Learning:
In unsupervised learning, an AI system is presented with unlabeled, un-categorized data and
the system’s algorithms act on the data without prior training. The output is dependent upon
the coded algorithms. Subjecting a system to unsupervised learning is one way of testing AI.

The unsupervised learning is categorized into 2 other categories which are “Clustering” and
“Association”.

Clustering:
A set of inputs is to be divided into groups. Unlike in classification, the groups are not known
beforehand, making this typically an unsupervised task.
Clustering

Methods used for clustering are:

 Gaussian mixtures
 K-Means Clustering
 Boosting
 Hierarchical Clustering
 K-Means Clustering
 Spectral Clustering

Overview of models under categories:

Overview of models

For training a model we initially split the model into 3 three sections which are ‘Training
data’ ,‘Validation data’ and ‘Testing data’.

You train the classifier using ‘training data set’, tune the parameters using ‘validation set’
and then test the performance of your classifier on unseen ‘test data set’. An important point
to note is that during training the classifier only the training and/or validation set is available.
The test data set must not be used during training the classifier. The test set will only be
available during testing the classifier.
Training set: The training set is the material through which the computer learns how to
process information. Machine learning uses algorithms to perform the training part. A set of
data used for learning, that is to fit the parameters of the classifier.

Validation set: Cross-validation is primarily used in applied machine learning to estimate the
skill of a machine learning model on unseen data. A set of unseen data is used from the
training data to tune the parameters of a classifier.

Test set: A set of unseen data used only to assess the performance of a fully-specified
classifier.

Once the data is divided into the 3 given segments we can start the training process.

In a data set, a training set is implemented to build up a model, while a test (or validation) set
is to validate the model built. Data points in the training set are excluded from the test
(validation) set. Usually, a data set is divided into a training set, a validation set (some people
use ‘test set’ instead) in each iteration, or divided into a training set, a validation set and a test
set in each iteration.

The model uses any one of the models that we had chosen in step 3/ point 3. Once the model
is trained we can use the same trained model to predict using the testing data i.e. the unseen
data. Once this is done we can develop a confusion matrix, this tells us how well our model is
trained. A confusion matrix has 4 parameters, which are ‘True positives’, ‘True Negatives’,
‘False Positives’ and ‘False Negative’. We prefer that we get more values in the True
negatives and true positives to get a more accurate model. The size of the Confusion matrix
completely depends upon the number of classes.

 True positives : These are cases in which we predicted TRUE and our predicted
output is correct.
 True negatives : We predicted FALSE and our predicted output is correct.
 False positives : We predicted TRUE, but the actual predicted output is FALSE.
 False negatives : We predicted FALSE, but the actual predicted output is TRUE.

We can also find out the accuracy of the model using the confusion matrix.

Accuracy = (True Positives +True Negatives) / (Total number of classes)

i.e. for the above example:

Accuracy = (100 + 50) / 165 = 0.9090 (90.9% accuracy)

5. Evaluation
Model Evaluation is an integral part of the model development process. It helps to find the
best model that represents our data and how well the chosen model will work in the future.
To improve the model we might tune the hyper-parameters of the model and try to improve
the accuracy and also looking at the confusion matrix to try to increase the number of true
positives and true negatives.

In this blog, we have discussed the workflow a Machine learning project and gives us a basic
idea of how a should the problem be tackled.

Implementation of the workflow of an Machine Learning project:

https://github.com/NotAyushXD/Titanic-dataset