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

Bias-Variance Trade-off


An interesting, arduous, and repetitive part of machine learning is the model evaluation journey. There is again, art and a different mindset required to build models that are robust. Throughout this book, we have simplified the model evaluation process with training and testing datasets that were derived by splitting the available data into a 70:30 or 80:20 ratio. Although this approach was effective in helping us understand how the model performs on unseen data, it still leaves several loopholes that might render the model futile for most other cases. We will need a more formal, thorough, and exhaustive method of validation for a machine learning model to be robust for future prediction events. In this chapter, we will study cross-validation and its various approaches to assess the performance of a machine learning model.

Before we delve into the specifics of the topic, we need to explore a crucial topic in machine learning called bias-variance trade-off. This topic...