Start empowering users and protecting corporate data, while managing identities and access with Microsoft Azure in different environments Key Features * Understand how to identify and manage business drivers during transitions * Explore Microsoft Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) solution * Over 40 playbooks to support your learning process with practical guidelines Book Description Microsoft Azure and its Identity and access management are at the heart of Microsoft's software as service products, including Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and Enterprise Mobility Management. It is crucial to master Microsoft Azure in order to be able to work with the Microsoft Cloud effectively. You’ll begin by identifying the benefits of Microsoft Azure in the field of identity and access management. Working through the functionality of identity and access management as a service, you will get a full overview of the Microsoft strategy. Understanding identity synchronization will help you to provide a well-managed identity. Project scenarios and examples will enable you to understand, troubleshoot, and develop on essential authentication protocols and publishing scenarios. Finally, you will acquire a thorough understanding of Microsoft Information protection technologies. What you will learn * Apply technical descriptions to your business needs and deployments * Manage cloud-only, simple, and complex hybrid environments * Apply correct and efficient monitoring and identity protection strategies * Design and deploy custom Identity and access management solutions * Build a complete identity and access management life cycle * Understand authentication and application publishing mechanisms * Use and understand the most crucial identity synchronization scenarios * Implement a suitable information protection strategy Who this book is for This book is a perfect companion for developers, cyber security specialists, system and security engineers, IT consultants/architects, and system administrators who are looking for perfectly up–to-date hybrid and cloud-only scenarios. You should have some understanding of security solutions, Active Directory, access privileges/rights, and authentication methods. Programming knowledge is not required but can be helpful for using PowerShell or working with APIs to customize your solutions.

Conquer complex and interesting programming challenges by building robust and concurrent applications with caches, cryptography, and parallel programming. Key Features * Understand how to use .NET frameworks like the Task Parallel Library (TPL)and CryptoAPI * Develop a containerized application based on microservices architecture * Gain insights into memory management techniques in .NET Core Book Description This Learning Path shows you how to create high performing applications and solve programming challenges using a wide range of C# features. You’ll begin by learning how to identify the bottlenecks in writing programs, highlight common performance pitfalls, and apply strategies to detect and resolve these issues early. You'll also study the importance of micro-services architecture for building fast applications and implementing resiliency and security in .NET Core. Then, you'll study the importance of defining and testing boundaries, abstracting away third-party code, and working with different types of test double, such as spies, mocks, and fakes. In addition to describing programming trade-offs, this Learning Path will also help you build a useful toolkit of techniques, including value caching, statistical analysis, and geometric algorithms. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: * C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 High Performance by Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan * Practical Test-Driven Development using C# 7 by John Callaway, Clayton Hunt * The Modern C# Challenge by Rod Stephens What you will learn * Measure application performance using BenchmarkDotNet * Leverage the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ)library to perform asynchronous operations * Modify a legacy application to make it testable * Use LINQ and PLINQ to search directories for files matching patterns * Find areas of polygons using geometric operations * Randomize arrays and lists with extension methods * Use cryptographic techniques to encrypt and decrypt strings and files Who this book is for If you want to improve the speed of your code and optimize the performance of your applications, or are simply looking for a practical resource on test driven development, this is the ideal Learning Path for you. Some familiarity with C# and .NET will be beneficial.

Harness the power of Python objects and data structures to implement algorithms for analyzing your data and efficiently extracting information Key Features * Turn your designs into working software by learning the Python syntax * Write robust code with a solid understanding of Python data structures * Understand when to use the functional or the OOP approach Book Description This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: * Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano * Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka * Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips What you will learn * Use data structures and control flow to write code * Use functions to bundle together a sequence of instructions * Implement objects in Python by creating classes and defining methods * Design public interfaces using abstraction, encapsulation and information hiding * Raise, define, and manipulate exceptions using special error objects * Create bulletproof and reliable software by writing unit tests * Learn the common programming patterns and algorithms used in Python Who this book is for If you are relatively new to coding and want to write scripts or programs to accomplish tasks using Python, or if you are an object-oriented programmer for other languages and seeking a leg up in the world of Python, then this Learning Path is for you. Though not essential, it will help you to have basic knowledge of programming and OOP.

Simplify your ETL processes with these hands-on data hygiene tips, tricks, and best practices. Key Features * Focus on the basics of data wrangling * Study various ways to extract the most out of your data in less time * Boost your learning curve with bonus topics like random data generation and data integrity checks Book Description For data to be useful and meaningful, it must be curated and refined. Data Wrangling with Python teaches you the core ideas behind these processes and equips you with knowledge of the most popular tools and techniques in the domain. The book starts with the absolute basics of Python, focusing mainly on data structures. It then delves into the fundamental tools of data wrangling like NumPy and Pandas libraries. You’ll explore useful insights into why you should stay away from traditional ways of data cleaning, as done in other languages, and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. This combination of Python tips and tricks will also demonstrate how to use the same Python backend and extract/transform data from an array of sources including the Internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, you’ll cover how to handle missing or wrong data, and reformat it based on the requirements from the downstream analytics tool. The book will further help you grasp concepts through real-world examples and datasets. By the end of this book, you will be confident in using a diverse array of sources to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently. What you will learn * Use and manipulate complex and simple data structures * Harness the full potential of DataFrames and numpy.array at run time * Perform web scraping with BeautifulSoup4 and html5lib * Execute advanced string search and manipulation with RegEX * Handle outliers and perform data imputation with Pandas * Use descriptive statistics and plotting techniques * Practice data wrangling and modeling using data generation techniques Who this book is for Data Wrangling with Python is designed for developers, data analysts, and business analysts who are keen to pursue a career as a full-fledged data scientist or analytics expert. Although, this book is for beginners, prior working knowledge of Python is necessary to easily grasp the concepts covered here. It will also help to have rudimentary knowledge of relational database and SQL.

Implement neural network architectures by building them from scratch for multiple real-world applications. Key Features * From scratch, build multiple neural network architectures such as CNN, RNN, LSTM in Keras * Discover tips and tricks for designing a robust neural network to solve real-world problems * Graduate from understanding the working details of neural networks and master the art of fine-tuning them Book Description This book will take you from the basics of neural networks to advanced implementations of architectures using a recipe-based approach. We will learn about how neural networks work and the impact of various hyper parameters on a network's accuracy along with leveraging neural networks for structured and unstructured data. Later, we will learn how to classify and detect objects in images. We will also learn to use transfer learning for multiple applications, including a self-driving car using Convolutional Neural Networks. We will generate images while leveraging GANs and also by performing image encoding. Additionally, we will perform text analysis using word vector based techniques. Later, we will use Recurrent Neural Networks and LSTM to implement chatbot and Machine Translation systems. Finally, you will learn about transcribing images, audio, and generating captions and also use Deep Q-learning to build an agent that plays Space Invaders game. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills to choose and customize multiple neural network architectures for various deep learning problems you might encounter. What you will learn * Build multiple advanced neural network architectures from scratch * Explore transfer learning to perform object detection and classification * Build self-driving car applications using instance and semantic segmentation * Understand data encoding for image, text and recommender systems * Implement text analysis using sequence-to-sequence learning * Leverage a combination of CNN and RNN to perform end-to-end learning * Build agents to play games using deep Q-learning Who this book is for This intermediate-level book targets beginners and intermediate-level machine learning practitioners and data scientists who have just started their journey with neural networks. This book is for those who are looking for resources to help them navigate through the various neural network architectures; you'll build multiple architectures, with concomitant case studies ordered by the complexity of the problem. A basic understanding of Python programming and a familiarity with basic machine learning are all you need to get started with this book.

Enhance your development skills with Java’s state-of-the-art features and projects to make your applications leaner and faster Key Features * Overcome the challenges involved in migrating to new versions of Java * Discover how Oracle has bridged the gap between Java and native code * Make the best use of new Java features and libraries in your applications Book Description With its new six-monthly release cadence, Java is moving forward faster. In addition to planned version releases, a lot of work is currently being undertaken on various Java projects at Oracle. In order to make best use of the new features in their applications and libraries, you must be well-versed with the most recent advancements. Java 11 and 12 – New Features will take you through the latest developments in Java, right from variable type inference and simplified multithreading through to performance improvements, which are covered in depth to help you make your applications more efficient. This book explains the relevance and applicability of Java's new features, and answers your questions on whether to invest in migrating to new Java versions and when to migrate. You'll also get to grips with platform features, such as AppCDS and new garbage collectors, to tune and optimize your application—from reduced launch time and latency to improved performance and throughput. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with a thorough understanding of the new features of Java 11, 12, and Project Amber, and possess the skills to apply them with a view to improving your application's performance. What you will learn * Study type interference and how to work with the var type * Understand Class-Data Sharing, its benefits, and limitations * Discover platform options to reduce your application’s launch time * Improve application performance by switching garbage collectors * Get up to date with the new Java release cadence * Define and assess decision criteria for migrating to a new version of Java Who this book is for If you’re an executive or solutions architect responsible for technology selection or Java migration decisions, this Java book is for you. You’ll also benefit from this book if you’re a computer science enthusiast curious to learn about the latest and upcoming Java features. This book will help you migrate your solutions from Java 8 or older to the latest Java release.

Learn to create and customize impressive Drupal 8 modules to extend your website's functionalities Key Features * Explore a plethora of Drupal 8 APIs and get the best out of them using the power of PHP coding * Learn to implement efficient data management and data security by creating dedicated modules for it. * Stay up to date with the changes introduced in the new Drupal 8 releases Book Description Drupal 8 comes with a release cycle that allows for new functionality to be added at a much faster pace. However, this also means code deprecations and changing architecture that you need to stay on top of. This book updates the first edition and includes the new functionality introduced in versions up to, and including 8.7. The book will first introduce you to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before diving into creating your first module with basic functionality. You will work with the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer and work with menus and links programmatically. Then, you will learn how to work with different kinds of data storages, create custom entities, field types and leverage the Database API for lower level database queries. You will further see how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with the various file systems and ensure the code you write works on multilingual sites. Finally, you will learn how to programmatically work with Views, write automated tests for your functionality and also write secure code in general. By the end, you will have learned how to develop your own custom module that can provide complex business solutions. And who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute it back to the Drupal community. What you will learn * Develop Drupal 8 modules that do all the things you want * Master numerous Drupal 8 sub-systems and APIs in the process * Model, store, manipulate and process data to serve your purposes * Display data and content in a clean and secure way using the Drupal 8 theme system * Test your business logic to prevent regressions * Stay ahead of the curve and write code following the current best practices Who this book is for The primary target of this book is Drupal developers who want to learn how to write modules and develop in Drupal 8. It is also intended for Drupal site builders and PHP developers who have basic Object Oriented Programming skills. A little bit of Symfony experience is helpful but not mandatory.

Discover advanced virtualization techniques and strategies to deliver centralized desktop and application services Key Features * Leverage advanced desktop virtualization techniques and strategies to transform your organization * Build better virtualized services for your users with VMware Horizon 7.8 * Develop and deploy end-to-end virtualized solutions Book Description Desktop virtualization can be tough, but VMware Horizon 7.8 changes all that. With a rich and adaptive UX, improved security,and a range of useful features for storage and networking optimization, there's plenty to love. But to properly fall in love with it, you need to know how to use it, and that means venturing deeper into the software and taking advantage of its extensive range of features, many of which are underused and underpromoted. This guide will take you through everything you need to know to not only successfully virtualize your desktop infrastructure, but also to maintain and optimize it to keep all your users happy. We'll show you how to assess and analyze your infrastructure, and how to use that analysis to design a solution that meets your organizational and user needs. Once you've done that, you'll find out how to build your virtualized environment, before deploying your virtualized solution. But more than that,we'll also make sure you know everything you need to know about the full range of features on offer, including the mobile cloud, so that you can use them to take full control of your virtualized infrastructure. What you will learn * Successfully configure Horizon 7.8 for the needs of your users * Deliver virtual desktops, session-based desktops, and hosted applications * Become familiar with how to develop, and deploy, a complete, end-to-end solution * Discover how to optimize desktop OS images for virtual desktops * Build, optimize, and tune desktop operating systems to deliver a superior end user experience * Explore the Horizon 7.8 infrastructure so that you can take full advantage of it Who this book is for This book is ideal for system admins, and solution architects interested in gaining hands-on experience with virtualization. It will take you to an advanced level, but at a pace that ensures you are always solving real-world problems. Some experience in desktop management using Windows and Microsoft Office (and familiarity with Active Directory, SQL, Windows Remote Desktop Session Hosting, and VMware vSphere technology) is necessary.

From learning about the most sought-after design patterns to a comprehensive coverage of architectural patterns and code testing, this book is all you need to write clean, reusable code Key Features *Write clean, reusable and maintainable code, and make the most of the latest Swift version. *Analyze case studies of some of the popular open source projects and give your workflow a huge boost *Choose patterns such as MVP, MVC, and MVVM depending on the application being built Book Description Swift keeps gaining traction not only amongst Apple developers but also as a server-side language. This book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. You’ll begin with a quick refresher on Swift, the compiler, the standard library, and the foundation, followed by the Cocoa design patterns – the ones at the core of many cocoa libraries – to follow up with the creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as defined by the GoF. You'll get acquainted with application architecture, as well as the most popular architectural design patterns, such as MVC and MVVM, and learn to use them in the context of Swift. In addition, you’ll walk through dependency injection and functional reactive programming. Special emphasis will be given to techniques to handle concurrency, including callbacks, futures and promises, and reactive programming. These techniques will help you adopt a test-driven approach to your workflow in order to use Swift Package Manager and integrate the framework into the original code base, along with Unit and UI testing. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build applications that are scalable, faster, and easier to maintain. What you will learn *Work efficiently with Foundation and Swift Standard library *Understand the most critical GoF patterns and use them efficiently *Use Swift 4.2 and its unique capabilities (and limitations) to implement and improve GoF patterns *Improve your application architecture and optimize for maintainability and performance *Write efficient and clean concurrent programs using futures and promises, or reactive programming techniques *Use Swift Package Manager to refactor your program into reusable components *Leverage testing and other techniques for writing robust code Who this book is for This book is for intermediate developers who want to apply design patterns with Swift to structure and scale their applications. You are expected to have basic knowledge of iOS and Swift.

Introduction to deep learning and PyTorch by building a convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network for real-world use cases such as image classification, transfer learning, and natural language processing. Key Features *Clear and concise explanations *Gives important insights into deep learning models *Practical demonstration of key concepts Book Description PyTorch is extremely powerful and yet easy to learn. It provides advanced features, such as supporting multiprocessor, distributed, and parallel computation. This book is an excellent entry point for those wanting to explore deep learning with PyTorch to harness its power. This book will introduce you to the PyTorch deep learning library and teach you how to train deep learning models without any hassle. We will set up the deep learning environment using PyTorch, and then train and deploy different types of deep learning models, such as CNN, RNN, and autoencoders. You will learn how to optimize models by tuning hyperparameters and how to use PyTorch in multiprocessor and distributed environments. We will discuss long short-term memory network (LSTMs) and build a language model to predict text. By the end of this book, you will be familiar with PyTorch's capabilities and be able to utilize the library to train your neural networks with relative ease. What you will learn *Set up the deep learning environment using the PyTorch library *Learn to build a deep learning model for image classification *Use a convolutional neural network for transfer learning *Understand to use PyTorch for natural language processing *Use a recurrent neural network to classify text *Understand how to optimize PyTorch in multiprocessor and distributed environments *Train, optimize, and deploy your neural networks for maximum accuracy and performance *Learn to deploy production-ready models Who this book is for Developers and Data Scientist familiar with Machine Learning but new to deep learning, or existing practitioners of deep learning who would like to use PyTorch to train their deep learning models will find this book to be useful. Having knowledge of Python programming will be an added advantage, while previous exposure to PyTorch is not needed.

Understand, explore, and effectively present data using the powerful data visualization techniques of Python Key Features *Use the power of Pandas and Matplotlib to easily solve data mining issues *Understand the basics of statistics to build powerful predictive data models *Grasp data mining concepts with helpful use-cases and examples Book Description Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: *Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti *Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim *Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou What you will learn *Understand the statistical fundamentals to build data models *Split data into independent groups *Apply aggregations and transformations to each group *Create impressive data visualizations *Prepare your data and design models *Clean up data to ease data analysis and visualization *Create insightful visualizations with Matplotlib and Seaborn *Customize the model to suit your own predictive goals Who this book is for If you want to learn how to use the many libraries of Python to extract impactful information from your data and present it as engaging visuals, then this is the ideal Learning Path for you. Some basic knowledge of Python is enough to get started with this Learning Path.

Explore C# and the .NET Core framework to create applications and optimize them with ASP.NET Core 2 Key Features *Get to grips with multi-threaded, concurrent, and asynchronous programming in C# and .NET Core *Develop modern, cross-platform applications with .NET Core 2.0 and C# 7.0 *Create efficient web applications with ASP.NET Core 2. Book Description C# is a widely used programming language, thanks to its easy learning curve, versatility, and support for modern paradigms. The language is used to create desktop apps, background services, web apps, and mobile apps. .NET Core is open source and compatible with Mac OS and Linux. There is no limit to what you can achieve with C# and .NET Core. This Learning Path begins with the basics of C# and object-oriented programming (OOP) and explores features of C#, such as tuples, pattern matching, and out variables. You will understand.NET Standard 2.0 class libraries and ASP.NET Core 2.0, and create professional websites, services, and applications. You will become familiar with mobile app development using Xamarin.Forms and learn to develop high-performing applications by writing optimized code with various profiling techniques. By the end of C# 7 and .NET: Designing Modern Cross-platform Applications, you will have all the knowledge required to build modern, cross-platform apps using C# and .NET. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: *C# 7.1 and .NET Core 2.0 - Modern Cross-Platform Development - Third Edition by Mark J. Price *C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 High Performance by Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan What you will learn *Explore ASP.NET Core to create professional web applications *Master OOP with C# to increase code reusability and efficiency *Protect your data using encryption and hashing *Measure application performance using BenchmarkDotNet *Use design techniques to increase your application’s performance *Learn memory management techniques in .NET Core *Understand tools and techniques to monitor application performance Who this book is for This Learning Path is designed for developers who want to gain a solid foundation in C# and .NET Core, and want to build cross-platform applications. To gain maximum benefit from this Learning Path, you must have basic knowledge of C#.

Explore and understand data with the powerful data visualization techniques of Tableau, and then communicate insights in powerful ways Key Features *Apply best practices in data visualization and chart types exploration *Explore the latest version of Tableau Desktop with hands-on examples *Understand the fundamentals of Tableau storytelling Book Description Graphical presentation of data enables us to easily understand complex data sets. Tableau 10 Complete Reference provides easy-to-follow recipes with several use cases and real-world business scenarios to get you up and running with Tableau 10. This Learning Path begins with the history of data visualization and its importance in today's businesses. You'll also be introduced to Tableau - how to connect, clean, and analyze data in this visual analytics software. Then, you'll learn how to apply what you've learned by creating some simple calculations in Tableau and using Table Calculations to help drive greater analysis from your data. Next, you'll explore different advanced chart types in Tableau. These chart types require you to have some understanding of the Tableau interface and understand basic calculations. You’ll study in detail all dashboard techniques and best practices. A number of recipes specifically for geospatial visualization, analytics, and data preparation are also covered. Last but not least, you'll learn about the power of storytelling through the creation of interactive dashboards in Tableau. Through this Learning Path, you will gain confidence and competence to analyze and communicate data and insights more efficiently and effectively by creating compelling interactive charts, dashboards, and stories in Tableau. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: *Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition by N. Milligan *Getting Started with Tableau 2018.x by Tristan Guillevin What you will learn *Build effective visualizations, dashboards, and story points *Build basic to more advanced charts with step-by-step recipes *Become familiar row-level, aggregate, and table calculations *Dig deep into data with clustering and distribution models *Prepare and transform data for analysis *Leverage Tableau’s mapping capabilities to visualize data *Use data storytelling techniques to aid decision making strategy Who this book is for Tableau 10 Complete Reference is designed for anyone who wants to understand their data better and represent it in an effective manner. It is also used for BI professionals and data analysts who want to do better at their jobs.

Build powerful data analytics applications with this business intelligence tool and overcome all your business challenges Key Features *Master time-saving techniques and make your QlikView development more efficient *Perform geographical analysis and sentiment analysis in your QlikView applications *Explore advanced QlikView techniques, tips, and tricks to deliver complex business requirements Book Description QlikView is one of the most flexible and powerful business intelligence platforms around, and if you want to transform data into insights, it is one of the best options you have at hand. Use this Learning Path, to explore the many features of QlikView to realize the potential of your data and present it as impactful and engaging visualizations. Each chapter in this Learning Path starts with an understanding of a business requirement and its associated data model and then helps you create insightful analysis and data visualizations around it. You will look at problems that you might encounter while visualizing complex data insights using QlikView, and learn how to troubleshoot these and other not-so-common errors. This Learning Path contains real-world examples from a variety of business domains, such as sales, finance, marketing, and human resources. With all the knowledge that you gain from this Learning Path, you will have all the experience you need to implement your next QlikView project like a pro. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: *QlikView for Developers by Miguel ?ngel García, Barry Harmsen *Mastering QlikView by Stephen Redmond *Mastering QlikView Data Visualization by Karl Pover What you will learn *Deliver common business requirements using advanced techniques *Load data from disparate sources to build associative data models *Understand when to apply more advanced data visualization *Utilize the built-in aggregation functions for complex calculations *Build a data architecture that supports scalable QlikView deployments *Troubleshoot common data visualization errors in QlikView *Protect your QlikView applications and data Who this book is for This Learning Path is designed for developers who want to go beyond their technical knowledge of QlikView and understand how to create analysis and data visualizations that solve real business needs. To grasp the concepts explained in this Learning Path, you should have a basic understanding of the common QlikView functions and some hands-on experience with the tool.

Step-by-step guide to build high performing predictive applications Key Features *Use the Python data analytics ecosystem to implement end-to-end predictive analytics projects *Explore advanced predictive modeling algorithms with an emphasis on theory with intuitive explanations *Learn to deploy a predictive model's results as an interactive application Book Description Predictive analytics is an applied field that employs a variety of quantitative methods using data to make predictions. It involves much more than just throwing data onto a computer to build a model. This book provides practical coverage to help you understand the most important concepts of predictive analytics. Using practical, step-by-step examples, we build predictive analytics solutions while using cutting-edge Python tools and packages. The book's step-by-step approach starts by defining the problem and moves on to identifying relevant data. We will also be performing data preparation, exploring and visualizing relationships, building models, tuning, evaluating, and deploying model. Each stage has relevant practical examples and efficient Python code. You will work with models such as KNN, Random Forests, and neural networks using the most important libraries in Python's data science stack: NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Keras, Dash, and so on. In addition to hands-on code examples, you will find intuitive explanations of the inner workings of the main techniques and algorithms used in predictive analytics. By the end of this book, you will be all set to build high-performance predictive analytics solutions using Python programming. What you will learn *Get to grips with the main concepts and principles of predictive analytics *Learn about the stages involved in producing complete predictive analytics solutions *Understand how to define a problem, propose a solution, and prepare a dataset *Use visualizations to explore relationships and gain insights into the dataset *Learn to build regression and classification models using scikit-learn *Use Keras to build powerful neural network models that produce accurate predictions *Learn to serve a model's predictions as a web application Who this book is for This book is for data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and Python developers who want to learn about predictive modeling and would like to implement predictive analytics solutions using Python's data stack. People from other backgrounds who would like to enter this exciting field will greatly benefit from reading this book. All you need is to be proficient in Python programming and have a basic understanding of statistics and college-level algebra.

A comprehensive guide to Android forensics, from setting up the workstation to analyzing key artifacts Key Features *Get up and running with modern mobile forensic strategies and techniques *Analyze the most popular Android applications using free and open source forensic tools *Learn malware detection and analysis techniques to investigate mobile cybersecurity incidents Book Description Many forensic examiners rely on commercial, push-button tools to retrieve and analyze data, even though there is no tool that does either of these jobs perfectly. Learning Android Forensics will introduce you to the most up-to-date Android platform and its architecture, and provide a high-level overview of what Android forensics entails. You will understand how data is stored on Android devices and how to set up a digital forensic examination environment. As you make your way through the chapters, you will work through various physical and logical techniques to extract data from devices in order to obtain forensic evidence. You will also learn how to recover deleted data and forensically analyze application data with the help of various open source and commercial tools. In the concluding chapters, you will explore malware analysis so that you’ll be able to investigate cybersecurity incidents involving Android malware. By the end of this book, you will have a complete understanding of the Android forensic process, you will have explored open source and commercial forensic tools, and will have basic skills of Android malware identification and analysis. What you will learn *Understand Android OS and architecture *Set up a forensics environment for Android analysis *Perform logical and physical data extractions *Learn to recover deleted data *Explore how to analyze application data *Identify malware on Android devices *Analyze Android malware Who this book is for If you are a forensic analyst or an information security professional wanting to develop your knowledge of Android forensics, then this is the book for you. Some basic knowledge of the Android mobile platform is expected.

Apply modern reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning methods using Python and its powerful libraries Key Features * Your entry point into the world of artificial intelligence using the power of Python * An example-rich guide to master various RL and DRL algorithms * Explore the power of modern Python libraries to gain confidence in building self-trained applications Book Description Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the trending and most promising branch of artificial intelligence. This Learning Path will help you master not only the basic reinforcement learning algorithms but also the advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The Learning Path starts with an introduction to RL followed by OpenAI Gym, and TensorFlow. You will then explore various RL algorithms, such as Markov Decision Process, Monte Carlo methods, and dynamic programming, including value and policy iteration. You'll also work on various datasets including image, text, and video. This example-rich guide will introduce you to deep RL algorithms, such as Dueling DQN, DRQN, A3C, PPO, and TRPO. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. You will also learn about imagination-augmented agents, learning from human preference, DQfD, HER, and many of the recent advancements in RL. By the end of the Learning Path, you will have all the knowledge and experience needed to implement RL and deep RL in your projects, and you enter the world of artificial intelligence to solve various real-life problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: * Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python by Sudharsan Ravichandiran * Python Reinforcement Learning Projects by Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, and Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani What you will learn * Train an agent to walk using OpenAI Gym and TensorFlow * Solve multi-armed-bandit problems using various algorithms * Build intelligent agents using the DRQN algorithm to play the Doom game * Teach your agent to play Connect4 using AlphaGo Zero * Defeat Atari arcade games using the value iteration method * Discover how to deal with discrete and continuous action spaces in various environments Who this book is for If you’re an ML/DL enthusiast interested in AI and want to explore RL and deep RL from scratch, this Learning Path is for you. Prior knowledge of linear algebra is expected.

Explore the different data mining techniques using the libraries and packages offered by Python Key Features * Grasp the basics of data loading, cleaning, analysis, and visualization * Use the popular Python libraries such as NumPy, pandas, matplotlib, and scikit-learn for data mining * Your one-stop guide to build efficient data mining pipelines without going into too much theory Book Description Data mining is a necessary and predictable response to the dawn of the information age. It is typically defined as the pattern and/ or trend discovery phase in the data mining pipeline, and Python is a popular tool for performing these tasks as it offers a wide variety of tools for data mining. This book will serve as a quick introduction to the concept of data mining and putting it to practical use with the help of popular Python packages and libraries. You will get a hands-on demonstration of working with different real-world datasets and extracting useful insights from them using popular Python libraries such as NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, and matplotlib. You will then learn the different stages of data mining such as data loading, cleaning, analysis, and visualization. You will also get a full conceptual description of popular data transformation, clustering, and classification techniques. By the end of this book, you will be able to build an efficient data mining pipeline using Python without any hassle. What you will learn * Explore the methods for summarizing datasets and visualizing/plotting data * Collect and format data for analytical work * Assign data points into groups and visualize clustering patterns * Learn how to predict continuous and categorical outputs for data * Clean, filter noise from, and reduce the dimensions of data * Serialize a data processing model using scikit-learn’s pipeline feature * Deploy the data processing model using Python’s pickle module Who this book is for Python developers interested in getting started with data mining will love this book. Budding data scientists and data analysts looking to quickly get to grips with practical data mining with Python will also find this book to be useful. Knowledge of Python programming is all you need to get started.

Manipulate and analyze network data with the power of Python and NetworkX Key Features * Understand the terminology and basic concepts of network science * Leverage the power of Python and NetworkX to represent data as a network * Apply common techniques for working with network data of varying sizes Book Description NetworkX is a leading free and open source package used for network science with the Python programming language. NetworkX can track properties of individuals and relationships, find communities, analyze resilience, detect key network locations, and perform a wide range of important tasks. With the recent release of version 2, NetworkX has been updated to be more powerful and easy to use. If you’re a data scientist, engineer, or computational social scientist, this book will guide you in using the Python programming language to gain insights into real-world networks. Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the core concepts of network science, along with examples that use real-world data and Python code. This book will introduce you to theoretical concepts such as scale-free and small-world networks, centrality measures, and agent-based modeling. You’ll also be able to look for scale-free networks in real data and visualize a network using circular, directed, and shell layouts. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to choose appropriate network representations, use NetworkX to build and characterize networks, and uncover insights while working with real-world systems. What you will learn * Use Python and NetworkX to analyze the properties of individuals and relationships * Encode data in network nodes and edges using NetworkX * Manipulate, store, and summarize data in network nodes and edges * Visualize a network using circular, directed and shell layouts * Find out how simulating behavior on networks can give insights into real-world problems * Understand the ongoing impact of network science on society, and its ethical considerations Who this book is for If you are a programmer or data scientist who wants to manipulate and analyze network data in Python, this book is perfect for you. Although prior knowledge of network science is not necessary, some Python programming experience will help you understand the concepts covered in the book easily.

Gain hands-on experience with industry-standard data analysis and machine learning tools in Python Key Features * Learn techniques to use data to identify the exact problem to be solved * Visualize data using different graphs * Identify how to select an appropriate algorithm for data extraction Book Description Data Science Projects with Python is designed to give you practical guidance on industry-standard data analysis and machine learning tools in Python, with the help of realistic data. The book will help you understand how you can use pandas and Matplotlib to critically examine a dataset with summary statistics and graphs, and extract the insights you seek to derive. You will continue to build on your knowledge as you learn how to prepare data and feed it to machine learning algorithms, such as regularized logistic regression and random forest, using the scikit-learn package. You’ll discover how to tune the algorithms to provide the best predictions on new and, unseen data. As you delve into later chapters, you’ll be able to understand the working and output of these algorithms and gain insight into not only the predictive capabilities of the models but also their reasons for making these predictions. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to confidently use various machine learning algorithms to perform detailed data analysis and extract meaningful insights from unstructured data. What you will learn * Install the required packages to set up a data science coding environment * Load data into a Jupyter Notebook running Python * Use Matplotlib to create data visualizations * Fit a model using scikit-learn * Use lasso and ridge regression to reduce overfitting * Fit and tune a random forest model and compare performance with logistic regression * Create visuals using the output of the Jupyter Notebook Who this book is for If you are a data analyst, data scientist, or a business analyst who wants to get started with using Python and machine learning techniques to analyze data and predict outcomes, this book is for you. Basic knowledge of computer programming and data analytics is a must. Familiarity with mathematical concepts such as algebra and basic statistics will be useful.

Concepts, tools, and techniques to explore deep learning architectures and methodologies Key Features * Explore advanced deep learning architectures using various datasets and frameworks * Implement deep architectures for neural network models such as CNN, RNN, GAN, and many more * Discover design patterns and different challenges for various deep learning architectures Book Description Deep learning architectures are composed of multilevel nonlinear operations that represent high-level abstractions; this allows you to learn useful feature representations from the data. This book will help you learn and implement deep learning architectures to resolve various deep learning research problems. Hands-On Deep Learning Architectures with Python explains the essential learning algorithms used for deep and shallow architectures. Packed with practical implementations and ideas to help you build efficient artificial intelligence systems (AI), this book will help you learn how neural networks play a major role in building deep architectures. You will understand various deep learning architectures (such as AlexNet, VGG Net, GoogleNet) with easy-to-follow code and diagrams. In addition to this, the book will also guide you in building and training various deep architectures such as the Boltzmann mechanism, autoencoders, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), natural language processing (NLP), GAN, and more—all with practical implementations. By the end of this book, you will be able to construct deep models using popular frameworks and datasets with the required design patterns for each architecture. You will be ready to explore the potential of deep architectures in today's world. What you will learn * Implement CNNs, RNNs, and other commonly used architectures with Python * Explore architectures such as VGGNet, AlexNet, and GoogLeNet * Build deep learning architectures for AI applications such as face and image recognition, fraud detection, and many more * Understand the architectures and applications of Boltzmann machines and autoencoders with concrete examples * Master artificial intelligence and neural network concepts and apply them to your architecture * Understand deep learning architectures for mobile and embedded systems Who this book is for If you’re a data scientist, machine learning developer/engineer, or deep learning practitioner, or are curious about AI and want to upgrade your knowledge of various deep learning architectures, this book will appeal to you. You are expected to have some knowledge of statistics and machine learning algorithms to get the best out of this book