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

Using k-means with public datasets


In what follows, we are going to learn more about partition clustering with k-means while exploring a dataset from the cluster.datasets package. This package contains datasets that were published in the book, Clustering algorithms, by Hartigan (1975), with examples of analyses. So let's start by installing this dataset on your machine, and loading it.

install.packages("cluster.datasets")
library(cluster.datasets)

Understanding the data with the all.us.city.crime.1970 dataset

We will first focus on getting to know the data, scaling the data to a common metric, and cluster interpretability. Our first exploration will concern the crime rates among different US cities in 1970. The dataset all.us.city.crime.1970 affords such investigation:

data(all.us.city.crime.1970)
crime = all.us.city.crime.1970

Let's investigate the attributes in the dataset:

ncol(crime)
names(crime)
summary(crime)

There are 10 attributes. A look at the R manual page (type ?all.us.city.crime.1970...