Learn Chai, Scikit-learn and Xstream

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Bots. Computers learning and communicating with us to do our bidding. But, where do you start? How do you get a machine to even begin to understand what you speak or type at it? There are several common machine learning algorithms that will help us begin to answer these questions.

In this course we’ll learn about common machine learning algorithms that don’t require implementing a neural network. We will not be going too much into the math behind them, but instead learn what each algorithm is good for, and how to train them. We'll also learn about a few metrics for evaluating models.

We’ll implement these in Python using `scikit-learn` using `scikit-learn`’s built-in data sets. The focus of this course is on implementation and a high-level understanding of these algorithms. 

We'll look at a few ways to evaluate our models, for both classification and regression models. We'll touch on mean squared error and coefficient of determination (for regression), and accuracy score, logarithmic loss, confusion matrices, and classification reports (for classification). 

Python 2.7 is used in the lesson videos but the code provided has Python 3 available. The only breaking change is the `print` statement API.

For additional information on installation, vocabulary, and common errors visit the `README.md` to the course code attached to each lesson.

Simple and efficient tools for data mining and data analysis

scikit-learn

Introductory Machine Learning Algorithms in Python with scikit-learn

Cycle.js is a framework where your app is described as a simple function taking an event stream as input and outputting an event stream.

cycle

This lesson is the first in an introduction to Cycle.js. We will see how to build from scratch a toy version of Cycle.js. See how to use RxJS to create simple web apps, and how to separate logic from effects.

Separate Logic from Effects in Cycle.js

Chai is a BDD / TDD assertion library for node and the browser that can be delightfully paired with any javascript testing framework.

chai

[Chai](https://npmjs.com/package/chai) assertions work great with the [Mocha](https://npmjs.com/package/mocha) testing framework. In this lesson we'll walk through out to install Chai and [karma-chai](https://npmjs.com/package/karma-chai) so you can use the `expect` assertions in your tests.

Use Chai assertions for tests in a Karma project

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

mocha

Every dependable library needs to have tests to ensure that you don't push accidental bugs. In this lesson, see how you can set up mocha and chai to start testing your library.

Setting up Unit Testing with Mocha and Chai

Now that you've got everything set up with mocha and chai, it's time to actually write tests. In this lesson you'll learn how to use `describe` and `it` to outline your tests and make sure you don't break your library in the future.

Unit Testing with Mocha and Chai

In this lesson, we will use Chai's request method to test our Node application's API responses.
By the end of this lesson, you will know how to:
- install the prerequisites to use mocha and chai in your application
- test for HTTP status response codes
- test for a string of text on a page
- test for a json response and validate the properties of the object
- write tests that not only verify the response of your application, but the behavior as well


Test Node RESTful API with Mocha and Chai

Writing great ES6 style Promises for Node.js is only half the battle. Your great modules must include tests as well to ensure future iterations don't break them. In this lesson, I show you a simple ES6 Promise in Node.js, then walk you through creating tests in Mocha using chai and chai-as-promised to test both resolve and reject methods.

Testing ES6 Promises in Node.js using Mocha and Chai

In this lesson, you will learn how to verify your API server is returning HTTP 400 responses when clients submit incorrect data. Returning HTTP 400 ensures that your clients are notified of the incorrect usage. Testing for them ensures your API returns errors instead of incorrect responses when supplied with incorrect data.

Test for HTTP 400 responses with Mocha and Chai

Linear regression is a linear model that is used for regression problems, or problems where the goal is to predict a value on a continuous spectrum (as opposed to a discrete category).

We’ll use linear regression to estimate continuous values. In this case, we’ll predict house prices in Boston. We'll also look at how to visualize our results with matplotlib, and how to evaluate our models with different metrics for regression problems.

Use Linear Regression To Estimate Continuous Values with Python and Scikit-learn

Despite its often confusing name, logistic regression is a **linear** model that is used for **classification**, or estimating discrete values.

We'll use an inbuilt scikit-learn dataset of iris data to classify irises into three categories. We'll also look at metrics and tools to evaluate our classification models, including the accuracy score, classification report, and confusion matrix.

Predict Categories in Python using Scikit-learn's Logistic Regression module

We’ll continue with the iris dataset to implement support vector machines, which can be used to find more complex boundaries for classification or regression problems. 

More about Support Vector Machines can be found at [scikit-learn](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html).

There are several types of kernel function that can be used with SVMs. Scikit-learn supports these kernels:

-linear

-polynomial ('poly')

-rbf (radial basis function) 

-sigmoid 

Custom kernels are also supported. `Rbf` is the default kernel type.

A good overview of kernels can be found [here](https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/06/select-support-vector-machine-kernels.html), or at the [scikit-learn page](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html#svm-kernels).

Use Support Vector Machines To Find Complex Decision Boundaries with Scikit-learn

We’ll continue with the iris dataset to implement k-nearest neighbors (`KNN`), which makes predictions about data based on similarity to other data instances. We'll visualize how the `KNN` algorithm works by making its predictions based on its neighbors' labels. We'll also examine the confusion matrix a bit further.

`KNN` can be used for both classification and regression problems. 

`KNN` is good for low dimensional data (data without too many input variables). It is not good for unbalanced data sets, and it can be computationally expensive.

Use K-nearest Neighbors To Find Similar Datapoints with Python and Scikit-learn

We’ll learn about decision trees, also known as CART (classification and regression trees), and use them to explore a dataset of breast cancer tumors. 

We'll also see how to visualize a decision tree using `graphviz`.

Implement Decision Trees in Python with Scikit-learn

We’ll return to the iris dataset to see how to use k-means clustering, an unsupervised learning algorithm, to create  categories for data that doesn't have labels. We'll also visualize these clusters using matplotlib.

More on K-means can be found at [Scikit-learn](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html#k-means).

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