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

Case study – exploring cancer-related deaths in the US


In this section, we will explore the rate of death due to cancer in the US. This will allow us to have a better feel of the importance of plotting data using a practical example. We will also discover interesting tools along the way. We will start by discovering the dataset, plotting some data, integrating data from other sources.

The dataset is part of latticeExtra, so we will install and load it first:

install.packages("latticeExtra")
library(latticeExtra)

Note that this may update lattice and require to restart R.

Discovering the dataset

Let's start by having a look at the attributes in the dataset and 3 rows of data:

head(USCancerRates, 3)

This outputs, included in the figure below, shows that there are 8 attributes, which relate to the rate of death due to cancer for males and females as well as the 95% confidence intervals (lower and higher bounds for both). Two other attributes allow identifying the county and state were the data of...