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

Probability distributions


In this section, we very briefly examine important distributions for common statistical problems with data consisting of quantities: the normal distribution and Student's t-distributions. We first introduce the idea of distributions with a discrete uniform distribution. We conclude with binomial distribution. We will try to be as non-technical as possible in this introduction to allow readers without statistical knowledge to follow easily; however, don't worry, we will be highly technical when explaining how to build functions that estimate correlations and regression coefficients.

Introducing probability distributions

Here, we introduce the idea of distributions using discrete uniform and binomial distributions.

Discrete uniform distribution

You might remember that, in Chapter 2, Visualizing and manipulating data using R, we examined outcomes of the roulette game. We showed that each of the 37 numbers (0 to 36) in European roulette has an equal probability of occurring...