Book excerpt: As machine learning is increasingly leveraged to find patterns, conduct analysis, and make decisions — sometimes without final input from humans who may be impacted by these findings — it is crucial to invest in bringing more stakeholders into the fold. This book of Python projects in machine learning tries to do just that: to equip the developers of today and tomorrow with tools they can use to better understand, evaluate, and shape machine learning to help ensure that it is serving us all. This book will set you up with a Python programming environment if you don’t have one already, then provide you with a conceptual understanding of machine learning in the chapter “An Introduction to Machine Learning.” What follows next are three Python machine learning projects. They will help you create a machine learning classifier, build a neural network to recognize handwritten digits, and give you a background in deep reinforcement learning through building a bot for Atari.