This book focuses on a speci fic sub- field of machine learning called predictive modeling. This is the field of machine learning that is the most useful in industry and the type of machine learning that the scikit-learn library in Python excels at facilitating. Unlike statistics, where models are used to understand data, predictive modeling is laser focused on developing models that make the most accurate predictions at the expense of explaining why predictions are made. Unlike the broader field of machine learning that could feasibly be used with data in any format, predictive modeling is primarily focused on tabular data (e.g. tables of numbers like in a spreadsheet).
