Code-Alongs: Applied Modeling

Code-Along Sessions

Code-along sessions provide hands-on practice with applied modeling concepts. Each session focuses on a specific aspect of the machine learning workflow, allowing you to apply what you've learned in the modules to real-world problems.

Code-Along 1: Feature Engineering and Imbalanced Datasets

In this code-along session, you'll work with a real-world dataset to practice feature engineering techniques and learn strategies for handling imbalanced datasets. Class imbalance is a common challenge in machine learning, especially in classification problems where one class is much more frequent than others.

What You'll Learn:

  • Creating meaningful features from raw data
  • Detecting and addressing class imbalance
  • Applying resampling techniques (oversampling, undersampling)
  • Using SMOTE and other advanced resampling methods
  • Selecting appropriate evaluation metrics for imbalanced datasets
  • Adjusting algorithm parameters to address imbalance

Resources:

Code-Along 2: Model Interpretation

In this code-along session, you'll explore various techniques for model interpretation, helping you understand how your models make predictions and which features have the greatest impact on those predictions.

What You'll Learn:

  • Understanding model explainability and its importance
  • Creating and interpreting partial dependence plots
  • Using SHAP values to understand feature contributions
  • Visualizing feature importance and interactions
  • Communicating model insights to stakeholders
  • Balancing model complexity with interpretability

Resources:

Preparing for Code-Alongs

To make the most of these code-along sessions, please take the following steps before each session:

  1. Download the starter notebooks from the provided links
  2. Ensure all required libraries are installed in your environment
  3. Review the relevant module(s) content related to the code-along topic
  4. Familiarize yourself with the dataset by reviewing any documentation
  5. Try to predict what challenges might arise and how you might address them

After the code-along session, compare your work with the solution notebook to identify areas for further learning. Keep in mind that there are often multiple valid approaches to solving a machine learning problem, so your solution may differ from the provided one while still being effective.

Additional Resources