Code-Alongs

Code-Alongs are live experiences taught by our expert instructors designed to prepare you for concepts found in the sprint challenges. They're your opportunity to work on complex job-ready problems in a live and engaging environment.

Code-Along 1: Data Wrangling and Encoding

Overview

In this Code-Along session, you'll learn essential data preparation techniques for tree-based models. We'll focus on handling categorical data and implementing proper encoding strategies that work well with decision trees and random forests.

Key Topics

  • Handling missing values in categorical and numerical data
  • Identifying and encoding high-cardinality categorical features
  • Implementing ordinal encoding for tree-based models
  • Feature selection and engineering for tree-based algorithms

Resources

Code-Along 2: Model Tuning

Overview

In this Code-Along session, you'll learn techniques for optimizing tree-based models to achieve better performance. We'll explore hyperparameter tuning, cross-validation, and model evaluation strategies specific to random forests.

Key Topics

  • Identifying key hyperparameters for tree-based models
  • Implementing grid search and random search for hyperparameter optimization
  • Cross-validation strategies for reliable model evaluation
  • Balancing model complexity against performance
  • Interpreting and visualizing model performance metrics

Resources