Introduction
A decade ago, machine learning was simply a concept but today it has changed the way we interact with technology. Devices are becoming smarter, faster and better, with Machine Learning at the helm.
Thus, we have designed a comprehensive list of projects in Machine Learning course that offers a hands-on experience with ML and how to build actual projects using the Machine Learning algorithms. Furthermore, this course is a follow up to our Introduction to Machine Learning course and delves further deeper into the practical applications of Machine Learning.
Progressing step by step
In this blog, we will have a look at projects divided mostly into two different levels i.e. Beginners and Advanced. First, projects mentioned under the beginner heading cover important concepts of a particular technique/algorithm. Similarly, projects under advanced category involve the application of multiple algorithms along with key concepts to reach the solution of the problem at hand.
Projects offered by Dimensionless Technologies
We have tried to take a more exciting approach to Machine Learning, by not working on simply the theory of it, but instead by using the technology to actually build real-world projects that you can use. Furthermore, you will learn how to write the codes and then see them in action and actually learn how to think like a machine learning expert.
Following are some of the projects among many others that they cover in their courses:
Disease Detection — In this project, you will use the K-nearest neighbor algorithm to help detect breast cancer malignancies by using a support vector machine.
Credit Card Fraud Detection — In this project, you are going to do a credit card fraud detection and going to focus on anomaly detection by using probability densities.
Stock Market Clustering Project — In this project, you will use a K-means clustering algorithm to identify related companies by finding correlations among stock market movements over a given time span.
Beginners
1) Iris Flowers Classification ML Project– Learn about Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms
Iris flowers dataset is one of the best data sets in classification literature. The classification of the iris flowers machine learning project is often referred to as the “Hello World” of machine learning. Furthermore, this dataset has numeric attributes and beginners need to figure out how to load and handle data. Also, the iris dataset is small which easily fits into the memory and does not require any special transformations or scaling, to begin with.
Iris Dataset can be downloaded from UCI ML Repository — Download Iris Flowers Dataset
The goal of this machine learning project is to classify the flowers into among the three species — virginica, setosa, or versicolor based on length and width of petals and sepals.
2) Social Media Sentiment Analysis using Twitter Dataset
Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit generate huge amounts of big data that can be mined in various ways to understand trends, public sentiments, and opinions. A sentiment analyzer learns about various sentiments behind a “content piece” through machine learning and predicts the same using AI. Also, Twitter data is considered a definitive entry point for beginners to practice sentiment analysis. Hence, using Twitter dataset, one can get a captivating blend of tweet contents and other related metadata such as hashtags, retweets, location and more which pave way for insightful analysis. Using Twitter data you can find out what the world is saying about a topic whether it is movies, sentiments about any trending topic. Probably, working with the Twitter dataset will help you understand the challenges associated with social media data mining and also learn about classifiers in depth.
3) Sales Forecasting using Walmart Dataset
Walmart dataset has sales data for 98 products across 45 outlets. Also, the dataset contains sales per store, per department on weekly basis. The goal of this machine learning project is to forecast sales for each department in each outlet consequently which will help them make better data-driven decisions for channel optimization and inventory planning. Certainly, the challenging aspect of working with Walmart dataset is that it contains selected markdown events which affect sales and should be taken into consideration.
Want to work with Walmart Dataset? Access the Complete Solution Here — Walmart Store Sales Forecasting Machine Learning Project
4. Play Money Ball
In the book Moneyball, the Oakland A’s revolutionized baseball through analytical player scouting. Furthermore, they built a competitive squad while spending only 1/3 of what large market teams like the Yankees were paying for salaries.
First, if you haven’t read the book yet, you should check it out. Ceratinly, It’s one of our favorites!
Fortunately, the sports world has a ton of data to play with. Data for teams, games, scores, and players are all tracked and freely available online.
There are plenty of fun machine learning projects for beginners. For example, you could try…
- Sports Betting… Predict box scores given the data available at the time right before each new game.
- Talent scouting… Use college statistics to predict which players would have the best professional careers.
- General managing… Create clusters of players based on their strengths in order to build a well-rounded team.
Sports is also an excellent domain for practicing data visualization and exploratory analysis. You can use these skills to help you decide which types of data to include in your analyses.
Data Sources
- Sports Statistics Database — Sports statistics and historical data covering many professional sports and several college ones. The clean interface makes it easier for web scraping.
- Sports Reference — Another database of sports statistics. More cluttered interface, but individual tables can be exported as CSV files.
- cricsheet.org — Ball-by-ball data for international and IPL cricket matches. CSV files for IPL and T20 internationals matches are available.
5) Titanic Data Set
As the name suggests (no points for guessing), this dataset provides the data on all the passengers who were aboard the RMS Titanic when it sank on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic ocean. Also, it is the most commonly used and referred to data set for beginners in data science. With 891 rows and 12 columns, this data set provides a combination of variables based on personal characteristics such as age, class of ticket and sex, and tests one’s classification skills.
Objective: Predict the survival of the passengers aboard RMS Titanic.
Advance level projects
This is where an aspiring data scientist makes the final push into the big leagues. After acquiring the necessary basics and honing them in the first two levels, it is time to confidently play the big game. Certainly, these datasets provide a platform for putting to use all the learnings and take on new, and more complex challenges.
1) Yelp Data Set
This data set is a part of the Yelp Dataset Challenge conducted by crowd-sourced review platform, Yelp. It is a subset of the data of Yelp’s businesses, reviews, and users, provided by the platform for educational and academic purposes.
In 2017, the tenth round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge was held and the data set contained information about local businesses in 12 metropolitan areas across 4 countries.
Rich data comprising 4,700,000 reviews, 156,000 businesses, and 200,000 pictures provides an ideal source of data for multi-faceted data projects. Projects such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis, photo classification, and graph mining among others, are some of the projects that can be carried out using this dataset containing diverse data. The data set is available in JSON and SQL formats.
Objective: Provide insights for operational improvements using the data available.
2) Chicago Crime Data Set
With the increasing demand to analyze large amounts of data within small time frames, organizations prefer working with the data directly over samples. Consequently, this presents a herculean task for a data scientist with a limitation of time.
This dataset contains information on reported incidents of crime in the city of Chicago from 2001 to the present. It does not contain data from the most recent seven days. Not included in the data set, is data on murder, where data is recorded for each victim.
It contains 6.51 million rows and 22 columns and is a multi-classification problem. In order to achieve mastery over working with abundant data, this dataset can serve as the ideal stepping stone.
Objective: Explore the data, and provide insights and forecasts about crimes in Chicago.
3) KDD Cup
KKD cup is a popular data mining and knowledge discovery competition held annually. It is one of the first-ever data science competition which dates back to 1997.
Every year, the KDD cup provides data scientists with an opportunity to work with data sets across different disciplines. Some of the problems tackled in the past include
- Identifying which authors correspond to the same person
- Predicting the click-through rate of ads using the given query and user information
- Development of algorithms for Computer Aided Detection (CAD) of early-stage breast cancer among others.
The latest edition of the challenge was held in 2017 and required participants to predict the traffic flow through highway tollgates.
Objective: Solve or make predictions for the problem presented every year.
Conclusion
Undertaking different kinds of projects is one of the good ways through which one can progress in any field. Certainly, this allows an individual to have hands on at the problems faced during the implementation phase. Also, it is easier to learn concepts by applying them. Finally, you will have a feeling of doing actual work rather than just being all lost in the theoretical part.
There are wonderful competitions available on kaggle and other similar data science competition platforms. Hence, make sure you take some time out and jump into these competitions. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, certainly, there is a lot of learning available while attempting these projects.
