What is Hierarchical Clustering? Hierarchical clustering is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. It is particularly useful for data that does not naturally fall into distinct groups. Unlike other clustering methods, hierarchical clustering does not require the nu...
What is Naive Bayes? Naive Bayes is a family of probabilistic algorithms based on Bayes’ Theorem, which is used for classification tasks. The term “naive” refers to the assumption that the features in a dataset are independent of each other, which is rarely the case in real-world s...
What is Gradient Boosting? Gradient Boosting is a machine learning technique used for regression and classification tasks. It builds models in a stage-wise fashion and generalizes them by optimizing a loss function. The core idea is to combine the predictions of several base estimators to improve ro...
Understanding XGBoost XGBoost is an open-source software library that provides a gradient boosting framework for C++, Java, Python, R, and Julia. It is designed to be highly efficient, flexible, and portable. The algorithm is renowned for its speed and performance, making it a favorite among data sc...
What is LightGBM? LightGBM is a gradient boosting framework that uses tree-based learning algorithms. It is designed to be distributed and efficient, making it ideal for large-scale data processing. Unlike traditional gradient boosting methods, LightGBM grows trees leaf-wise rather than level-wise, ...
What is CatBoost? CatBoost, short for Categorical Boosting, is an open-source machine learning library that is designed to handle categorical data efficiently. Unlike other gradient boosting libraries, CatBoost automatically deals with categorical features, eliminating the need for extensive preproc...
Understanding K-Means Clustering K-Means clustering is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm used to partition a dataset into distinct groups, or clusters. The primary goal is to minimize the variance within each cluster while maximizing the variance between clusters. This is achieved by iterat...
What is Principal Component Analysis (PCA)? Principal Component Analysis is a statistical procedure that transforms a set of correlated variables into a set of uncorrelated variables called principal components. The primary goal of PCA is to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset while preserving as...
Understanding Recurrent Neural Networks Recurrent Neural Networks are a class of artificial neural networks designed to recognize patterns in sequences of data. Unlike traditional neural networks, RNNs have connections that form directed cycles, allowing them to maintain a ‘memory’ of pr...
What is Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)? LSTM is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture designed to overcome the limitations of traditional RNNs, particularly in handling long-term dependencies. Introduced by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber in 1997, LSTMs are capable of learning order depend...