Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with R

By : Eric Mayor
Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with R

By: Eric Mayor

Overview of this book

This book is packed with easy-to-follow guidelines that explain the workings of the many key data mining tools of R, which are used to discover knowledge from your data. You will learn how to perform key predictive analytics tasks using R, such as train and test predictive models for classification and regression tasks, score new data sets and so on. All chapters will guide you in acquiring the skills in a practical way. Most chapters also include a theoretical introduction that will sharpen your understanding of the subject matter and invite you to go further. The book familiarizes you with the most common data mining tools of R, such as k-means, hierarchical regression, linear regression, association rules, principal component analysis, multilevel modeling, k-NN, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, and text mining. It also provides a description of visualization techniques using the basic visualization tools of R as well as lattice for visualizing patterns in data organized in groups. This book is invaluable for anyone fascinated by the data mining opportunities offered by GNU R and its packages.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Learning Predictive Analytics with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Exercises and Solutions
Index

Mining the news with R


In this section, we discuss news mining in R. We start with a successful document classification and then discuss how to collect news articles directly from R.

A successful document classification

In this section, we examine a particular dataset which features a term-document matrix of 2,071 press articles containing the word flu in their title. The articles were found on LexisNexis using this search term in two newspapers, The New York Times and The Guardian, between January 1980 and May 2013. For copyright reasons, we cannot include the original articles here. These have been preprocessed in a similar way to what we have seen before with another software, Rapidminer 5. In addition to the term-document matrix, the type of seasonal flu versus other (avian and swine flu)–is included in the first column of the data frame (the SEASONAL.FLU attribute). When articles discussed seasonal flu and other strands, they were coded as other (value 0). Terms were coded as present...