Python: Real-World Data Science

An introduction to the basic terminology and notations

Now that we have discussed the three broad categories of machine learning—supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning—let us have a look at the basic terminology that we will be using in the next chapters. The following table depicts an excerpt of the Iris dataset, which is a classic example in the field of machine learning. The Iris dataset contains the measurements of 150 iris flowers from three different species: Setosa, Versicolor, and Virginica. Here, each flower sample represents one row in our data set, and the flower measurements in centimeters are stored as columns, which we also call the features of the dataset:

To keep the notation and implementation simple yet efficient, ...