We have already written quite a few times about our vtreat open source variable treatment package for R (which implements effects/impact coding, missing value replacement, and novel value replacement; among other important data preparation steps), but we thought we would take some time to describe some of the principles behind […]
We have been recently working on and presenting on nested modeling issues. These are situations where the output of one trained machine learning model is part of the input of a later model or procedure. I am now of the opinion that correct treatment of nested models is one of […]
I have been working through (with some honest appreciation) a recent article comparing many classifiers on many data sets: “Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?” Manuel Fernández-Delgado, Eva Cernadas, Senén Barro, Dinani Amorim; 15(Oct):3133−3181, 2014 (which we will call “the DWN paper” in this […]
When you apply machine learning algorithms on a regular basis, on a wide variety of data sets, you find that certain data issues come up again and again: Missing values (NA or blanks) Problematic numerical values (Inf, NaN, sentinel values like 999999999 or -1) Valid categorical levels that don’t appear […]