Machine learning algorithms solve complex problems that traditional programming approaches struggle to address. They enable automation of tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming or even impossible for humans to perform efficiently.
Machine learning drives innovation and optimizes processes and systems by learning from data and improving performance over time. Having a solid understanding of a diverse number of algorithms is essentially a survival skill for ML engineers since it is a major requirement for building powerful and intelligent models.
Data Scientists, analysts, and software engineers design various ML algorithms depending on the specific goals and resources. However, there are some top algorithms that every aspiring ML developer must know to stay relevant in the rapidly evolving field of Machine Learning.
We are enlisting here the top 10 such algorithms that serve as foundational tools for solving a wide range of problems today.
Top ML Algorithms Data Scientists Must Know in 2024
Aspiring data scientists, machine learning developers, and engineers must know these algorithms to solve real-life complex problems. They are used for pattern recognition to provide real-life solutions like image and speech recognition. They are helpful in some specific domains like healthcare, where they can forecast or predict diseases and suggest treatment plans.
ML algorithms power personalized content delivery on platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon. These complex yet intelligent algorithms analyze behavior and preferences to provide tailored recommendations to users.
Let's dive straight to these popular ML algorithms that can help you crack your next interview. Also, know what are some real-life examples of these popular ML algorithms.
Linear Regression - ML Algorithm for Prediction
Linear Regression is one of the commonly used ML algorithms. It defines the relationship between two or more variables and predicts the outcome of an event based on the independent variable data points. As the name ‘Regression’ suggests in statistics, the variation of one variable is based on another input variable.
It is one of the most commonly used machine learning algorithms for prediction. So, these algorithms are used to develop sophisticated programs. For example, sales forecasting, where linear regression can predict future sales based on historical sales data and other relevant factors.
It learns from large data and quantifies the relation. It belongs to supervised Machine Learning, which is a type of algorithm that learns from labeled data. The objective is to receive input and train an algorithm to predict accurate data. There are different types of Linear Regression algorithms - linear, multiple, and non-linear regression.
Logistic Regression - Popular Algorithm in Machine Learning
Logistic regression - a type of classification algorithm, is designed to compute the chance of a binary outcome when the inputs are passed through the algorithm. Instead of just modeling the linear relationship, logistic regression assumes categorical outcomes and applies a logistic function. It is used across domains such as medicine (disease diagnosis), marketing (which includes customer segmentation), and natural language processing (sentiment analysis).
Example of Logistic regression algorithm is to analyze whether an email is spam or not based on the features present in the email, like presence of certain keywords.
Decision Trees
Decision trees are by far the simplest, most understandable, and most widely used algorithms for classification and regression tasks. They separate the space into a chain of decision nodes through the feature values. They do it in a way that creates transparent and intelligible models. Decision trees have found purposes in areas ranging from financial services (for instance, credit scoring) to the telecom industry (churn prediction) and image recognition (object detection).
As the name suggests, these algorithms are valuable for understanding and explaining the decision-making process of a model. This algorithm is used for both classification and regression tasks. These algorithms have several advantages, including interpretability in order to provide a clear understanding of the decision-making process.
These intelligent algorithms are useful for fraud detection across different industries like finance.
Random Forest ML Algorithm
Random forest is a team of learning techniques tied together in such a way that they raise the prediction accuracy and reduce overfitting. It creates a set of decision trees from a portion of the training data and features written in the form of a forest.
The application range of random forest can be classified into many sectors, such as finance for stock price prediction, biotechnologies for gene expression analysis, or dealing with recommendation systems such as the recommendation of movies or products.
These ML algorithms are quite powerful. These algorithms include small decision-making trees and each tree looks at a random part of the problem and gives its own suggestion. So, Random Forest combines all these suggestions to make a final decision. This build sophisticated applications as the final decision goes through several small decisions first.
Support Vector Machine (SVM)
Support Vector Machine (SVM) is also a type of supervised learning ML algorithm and can be used for both classification or regression challenges. It can also be used for spam detection and image classification. The algorithm works on smaller datasets but on the complex ones.
The main objective of SVM algorithms is to establish a decision boundary or a threshold that can divide n-dimensional space into classes, thus allowing quickly classify fresh data points in the future. The boundary here is termed hyperplane.
SVMs distinguish between two classes by finding the optimal hyperplane. This algorithm can handle both linear and nonlinear classification tasks.
k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithms
It is a non-parametric, supervised learning classifier, which uses proximity to make predictions about the grouping of an individual data point. It is a versatile and widely used machine learning algorithm which is easy to implement. It can handle both numerical and categorical data, thus making a best choice for various types of datasets in classification and regression tasks.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used technique of dimension reduction in data processing to obtain a new set of variables that will capture the maximum variability present in the initial variables. PCA finds the principal axes that can explain the data variances and capture the maximum. It is applied to data exploratory data analysis, feature extraction, noise utility reduction, and visualization tasks.
k-means algorithm
K-means algorithm of unsupervised learning is used to formulate k clusters based on closeness from an available dataset. It is done through the iterative process of assigning the data points to the cluster (cluster) center with the shortest distance until the convergence. K-means clustering is common in the customer segmentation, image compression, document clustering, and anomaly detection sectors.
Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM)
Gradient boosting (GB) machines are ensemble learning techniques that powerfully predict by linking a set of weak learners (decision trees typically) sequentially to reduce the number of prediction errors. GBM subsequently uses residual fitting for the residual errors of the previous one and achieves incremental accuracy of prediction. Kaggle and others host GBM competitions, which many users then find in search engines like ranking algorithms.
Deep Learning (Neural Networks)
Deep learning represents a class of capable machine learning systems inspired by the functioning of the human brain. Neural Networks, conjunctions of deep learning models, hold layers of artificial neurons connected together and work through data to make complex representations learned. Deep learning has been the revolutionary aspect in computer vision (e.g., image classification), natural language processing (e.g., language translation), and speech recognition (e.g., virtual language assistants).
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These machine learning algorithms open the door to the most important tools and models that today's engineers need to have in their toolbox to solve advanced real-world problems. With knowledge of principles, applications, and implementation of these algorithms, data engineers can develop creative apps, facilitate business in the form of values, and contribute to advancement in artificial intelligence. Continuous improvement and always being aware of the latest developments in this field are among the most important factors for successful projecting in an environment that changes rapidly.
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FAQs around Machine Learning Algorithms
- What are the main types of machine learning algorithms?
There are three main types of machine learning algorithms:
- supervised learning
- unsupervised learning
- reinforcement learning.
- How to build a machine learning model?
To prepare an ML model, you must equip with the right skills. You have to gather and explore the data and choose the right type of algorithm that could address the problem and bring a solution. You have to do data cleaning and processing before sending it for training. Select an appropriate algorithm from the list of top ML algorithms based on the problem type. You may have experiment with multiple algorithms to determine which is best suitable.
- How hard is it to learn a Machine Learning algorithm?
Learning can vary based on your existing domain knowledge. Having a strong foundation in mathematics and statistics and programming like Python can help you understand a ML algorithm much better.
- What makes a Machine Learning Algorithm different from a traditional algorithm?
Traditional algorithms are based on instructions given by humans to perform specific tasks. These rules are typically static, which means they don’t change over time. On the other hand, ML algorithms learn patterns and relationships between variables and bring better outcomes. This allows the latter to make predictions and decisions on new, unseen data.
ML algorithms excel at pattern recognition and decision-making, whereas traditional algorithms are designed to solve specific, well-defined tasks or problems using a set of predetermined rules.
