Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with R

By : Karthik Ramasubramanian, Jojo Moolayil
Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with R

By: Karthik Ramasubramanian, Jojo Moolayil

Overview of this book

R provides excellent visualization features that are essential for exploring data before using it in automated learning. Applied Supervised Learning with R helps you cover the complete process of employing R to develop applications using supervised machine learning algorithms for your business needs. The book starts by helping you develop your analytical thinking to create a problem statement using business inputs and domain research. You will then learn different evaluation metrics that compare various algorithms, and later progress to using these metrics to select the best algorithm for your problem. After finalizing the algorithm you want to use, you will study the hyperparameter optimization technique to fine-tune your set of optimal parameters. The book demonstrates how you can add different regularization terms to avoid overfitting your model. By the end of this book, you will have gained the advanced skills you need for modeling a supervised machine learning algorithm that precisely fulfills your business needs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Applied Supervised Learning with R
Preface

Regression and Classification Problems


We see classification and regression problems all around us in our daily life. The chances of rain from https://weather.com, our emails getting filtered into the spam mailbox and inbox, our personal and home loans getting accepted or rejected, deciding to pick our next holiday destination, exploring the options for buying a new house, investment decisions to gain short- and long-term benefits, purchasing the next book from Amazon; the list goes on and on. The world around us today is increasingly being run by algorithms that help us with our choices (which is not always a good thing).

As discussed in Chapter 2, Exploratory Analysis of Data, we will use the Minto Pyramid principle called Situation–Complication–Question (SCQ) to define our problem statement. The following table shows the SCQ approach for Beijing's PM2.5 problem:

Figure 3.3: Applying SCQ on Beijing's PM2.5 problem.

Now, in the SCQ construct described in the previous table, we can do a simple...