Hands On Machine Learning With Scikit Learn and TensorFlow-427-432

APPENDIX B
Machine Learning project checklist
This checklist can guide you through your Machine Learning projects. There are 8
main steps:
1. Frame the problem and look at the big picture

2. Get the data.
3. Explore it, gain insights.
4. Prepare it to better expose the underlying data patterns to Machine Learning
algorithms.
5. Explore many different models and short-list the best ones.
6. Fine-tune your models and combine them into a great solution.
7. Present your solution.
8. Launch, monitor and maintain your system.
Obviously, you should feel free to adapt this checklist to your needs.
Frame the problem and look at the big picture

1. Define the objective in business terms.
2. How will your solution be used?
3. What are the current solutions / workarounds (if any)?
4. How should you frame this problem? (supervised/unsupervised, online/offline,
etc.)
5. How should performance be measured?
6. Is the performance measure aligned with the business objective?
425
7. What would be the minimum performance needed to reach the business objec‐
tive?
8. What are comparable problems? Can you reuse experience or tools?
9. Is human expertise available?
10. How would you solve the problem manually?
11. List the assumptions you (or others) have made so far.
12. Verify assumptions if possible.
Get the data

Note: Automate as much as possible so you can easily get fresh data.
1. List the data you need and how much you need.
2. Find and document where you can you get that data.
3. Check how much space it will take.
4. Check legal obligations, get authorization if necessary.
5. Get access authorizations.
6. Create a workspace (with enough storage space).
7. Get the data.
8. Convert the data to a format you can easily manipulate (without changing the
data itself).
9. Ensure sensitive information is deleted or protected (eg. anonymized).
10. Check the size and type of data (time series, sample, geographical, etc.).
11. Sample a test set, put it aside and never look at it (no data snooping!).
Explore the data

Note: try to get insights from a field expert for these steps.
1. Create a copy of the data for exploration (sampling it down to a manageable size
if necessary).
2. Create a Jupyter notebook to keep a record of your data exploration.
3. Study each attribute and its characteristics:
• name
• type (categorical, int/float, bounded/unbounded, text, structured, etc.)
426 | Appendix B: Machine Learning project checklist

• % of missing values
• noisiness and type of noise (stochastic, outliers, rounding errors, etc.)
• possibly useful for the task?
• type of distribution (Gaussian, uniform, logarithmic, etc.)
4. For supervised learning tasks, identify the target attribute(s).

5. Visualize the data.
6. Study the correlations between attributes.
7. Study how you would solve the problem manually.
8. Identify the promising transformations you may want to apply.
9. Identify extra data that would be useful (go back to “Get the data” on page 426).
10. Document what you have learned.
Prepare the data

Notes:
• Work on copies of the data (keep the original dataset intact).

• Write functions for all data transformations you apply, for 4 reasons:
— so you can easily prepare the data the next time you get a fresh dataset,
— so you can apply these transformations in future projects,
— to clean & prepare the test set,
— to clean & prepare new data instances once your solution is live,
— and to make it easy to treat your preparation choices as hyperparameters.
1. Data cleaning:
• Fix or remove outliers (optional).
• Fill in missing values (eg. with zero, mean, median…) or drop their rows (or
columns).
2. Feature selection (optional):

• Drop the attributes that provide no useful information for the task.
3. Feature engineering, where appropriate:

• Discretize continuous features.
Machine Learning project checklist | 427

• Decompose features (eg. categorical, date/time, etc.).
• Add promising transformations of features (eg. log(x), sqrt(x), x^2, etc.).
• Aggregate features into promising new features.
4. Feature scaling: standardize or normalize features.
Short-list promising models

Notes:
• If the data is huge, you may want to sample smaller training sets so you can train
many different models in a reasonable time (be aware that this penalizes complex
models such as large neural nets or random forests).
• Once again, try to automate these steps as much as possible.
1. Train many quick & dirty models from different categories (eg. linear, naive
Bayes, SVM, random forest, neural net, etc.) using standard parameters.
2. Measure and compare their performance.
• For each model, use N-fold cross-validation and compute the mean and stan‐
dard deviation of the performance measure on the N folds.
3. Analyze the most significant variables for each algorithm.

4. Analyze the types of errors the models make.
• What data would a human have used to avoid these errors?
5. Quick round of feature selection and engineering.

6. One or two more quick iterations of the 5 previous steps.
7. Short-list the top 3-5 most promising models, preferring models that make dif‐
ferent types of errors.
Fine-tune the system

Notes:
• You will want to use as much data as possible for this step, especially as you move
towards the end of fine-tuning.
• As always automate what you can.

1. Fine-tune the hyperparameters using cross-validation.
• Treat your data transformation choices as hyperparameters, especially when
you are not sure about them (eg. should I replace missing values with zero or
with the median value? Or just drop the rows?).
• Unless there are very few hyperparameter values to explore, prefer random
search over grid search. If training is very long, you may prefer a Bayesian
optimization approach (eg. using Gaussian process priors1).
2. Try ensemble methods. Combining your best models will often perform better
than running them individually.
3. Once you are confident about your final model, measure its performance on the
test set to estimate the generalization error.
Don’t tweak your model after measuring the generalization error:

you would just start overfitting the test set.
Present your solution

1. Document what you have done.
2. Create a nice presentation.
• Making sure you highlight the big picture first.
3. Explain why your solution achieves the business objective.

4. Don’t forget to present interesting points you noticed along the way.
• What worked and what did not.
• List your assumptions and you system’s limitations.
5. Ensure your key findings are communicated through beautiful visualizations or

easy to remember statements (eg. “the median income is the number one predic‐
tor of housing prices”).
1 As described in Snoek, Larochelle, Adams (2012): https://goo.gl/PEFfGr
Machine Learning project checklist | 429

Launch!
1. Get your solution ready for production (eg. plug to production data inputs, write
unit tests, etc.).
2. Write monitoring code to check your system’s live performance at regular inter‐
vals and trigger alerts when it drops.
• Beware of slow degradation too: models tend to “rot” as data evolves.
• Measuring performance may require a human pipeline (eg. via a crowdsourc‐
ing service).
• Also monitor your inputs’ quality (eg. a malfunctioning sensor sending ran‐
dom values, or another team’s output becoming stale). This is particularly
important for online learning systems.
3. Retrain your models on a regular basis on fresh data (automate as much as possi‐
ble).

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APPENDIX B

Machine Learning project checklist

1. Frame the problem and look at the big picture

Frame the problem and look at the big picture

Get the data

Explore the data

426 | Appendix B: Machine Learning project checklist

4. For supervised learning tasks, identify the target attribute(s).

Prepare the data

• Work on copies of the data (keep the original dataset intact).

2. Feature selection (optional):

3. Feature engineering, where appropriate:

Machine Learning project checklist | 427

4. Feature scaling: standardize or normalize features.

Short-list promising models

3. Analyze the most significant variables for each algorithm.

5. Quick round of feature selection and engineering.

Fine-tune the system

428 | Appendix B: Machine Learning project checklist

Don’t tweak your model after measuring the generalization error:

Present your solution

3. Explain why your solution achieves the business objective.

5. Ensure your key findings are communicated through beautiful visualizations or

1 As described in Snoek, Larochelle, Adams (2012): https://goo.gl/PEFfGr

Machine Learning project checklist | 429

430 | Appendix B: Machine Learning project checklist

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