Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By : Brett Lantz
Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By: Brett Lantz

Overview of this book

Machine learning, at its core, is concerned with transforming data into actionable knowledge. R offers a powerful set of machine learning methods to quickly and easily gain insight from your data. Machine Learning with R, Third Edition provides a hands-on, readable guide to applying machine learning to real-world problems. Whether you are an experienced R user or new to the language, Brett Lantz teaches you everything you need to uncover key insights, make new predictions, and visualize your findings. This new 3rd edition updates the classic R data science book to R 3.6 with newer and better libraries, advice on ethical and bias issues in machine learning, and an introduction to deep learning. Find powerful new insights in your data; discover machine learning with R.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Machine Learning with R - Third Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
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Index

Exploring and understanding data


After collecting data and loading it into R data structures, the next step in the machine learning process involves examining the data in detail. It is during this step that you will begin to explore the data's features and examples, and realize the peculiarities that make your data unique. The better you understand your data, the better you will be able to match a machine learning model to your learning problem.

The best way to learn the process of data exploration is by example. In this section, we will explore the usedcars.csv dataset, which contains actual data about used cars advertised for sale on a popular US website in the year 2012.

Note

The usedcars.csv dataset is available for download on the Packt Publishing support page for this book. If you are following along with the examples, be sure that this file has been downloaded and saved to your R working directory.

Since the dataset is stored in CSV form, we can use the read.csv() function to load the...