530 pages, published in 2018

This book would have definitely not been a reality without the help and support from some excellent people and organizations that have helped us along this journey. First and foremost, a big thank you to all our readers for not only reading our books but also supporting us with valuable feedback and insights. Truly, we have learnt a lot from all of you and still continue to do so. We would like to acknowledge the entire team at Apress for working tirelessly behind the scenes to create and publish quality content for everyone. A big shout-out goes to the entire Python developer community, especially to the developers of frameworks like numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, spacy, nltk, pandas, statsmodels, keras, and tensorflow. Thanks also to organizations like Anaconda, for making the lives of data scientists easier and for fostering an amazing ecosystem around Data Science and Machine Learning that has been growing exponentially with time. We also thank our friends, colleagues, teachers, managers, and well-wishers for supporting us with excellent challenges, strong motivation, and good thoughts. A special mention goes to Ram Varra for not only being a great mentor and guide to us, but also teaching us how to leverage Data Science as an effective tool from technical aspects as well as from the business and domain perspectives for adding real impact and value. We would also like to express our gratitude to our managers and mentors, both past and present, including Nagendra Venkatesh, Sanjeev Reddy, Tamoghna Ghosh and Sailaja Parthasarathy. A lot of the content in this book wouldn’t have been possible without the help from several people and some excellent resources. We would like to thank Christopher Olah for providing some excellent depictions and explanation for LSTM models (http://colah.github.io), Edwin Chen for also providing an excellent depiction for LSTM models in his blog (http://blog.echen.me), Gabriel Moreira for providing some excellent pointers on feature engineering techniques, Ian London for his resources on the Visual Bag of Words Model (https://ianlondon.github.io), the folks at DataScience.com, especially Pramit Choudhary, Ian Swanson, and Aaron Kramer, for helping us cover a lot of ground in model interpretation with skater (https://www.datascience.com), Karlijn Willems and DataCamp for providing an excellent source of information pertaining to wine quality analysis (https://www.datacamp.com), Siraj Raval for creating amazing content especially with regard to time series analysis and recommendation engines, Amar Lalwani for giving us some vital inputs around time series forecasting with Deep Learning, Harish Narayanan for an excellent article on neural style transfer (https://harishnarayanan.org/writing), and last but certainly not the least, François Chollet for creating keras and writing an excellent book on Deep Learning. I would also like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to my parents, Digbijoy and Sampa, my partner Durba and my family and well-wishers for their constant love, support, and encouragement that drive me to strive to achieve more. Special thanks to my fellow colleagues, friends, and co-authors Raghav and Tushar for slogging many days and nights with me and making this experience worthwhile! Finally, once again I would like to thank the entire team at Apress, especially Sanchita Mandal, Celestin John, Matthew Moodie, and our technical reviewer, Jojo Moolayil, for being a part of this wonderful journey. —Dipanjan Sarkar

Dipanjan Sarkar, Raghav Bali, Tushar Sharma