Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

By : Imran Ahmad
5 (2)
Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

5 (2)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works. You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
13
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Understanding classification algorithms

In supervised machine learning, if the target variable is a category variable, the model is categorized as a classifier:

  • The target variable is called a label.

  • The historical data is called labeled data.

  • The production data, which the label needs to be predicted for, is called unlabeled data.

The ability to accurately label unlabeled data using a trained model is the real power of classification algorithms. Classifiers predict labels for unlabeled data to answer a particular business question.

Before we present the details of classification algorithms, let's first present a business problem that we will use as a challenge for classifiers. We will then use six different algorithms to answer the same challenge, which will help us compare their methodology, approach, and performance.

...