Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook

By : Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)
Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook

By: Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)

Overview of this book

<p>The R language is a powerful open source functional programming language. At its core, R is a statistical programming language that provides impressive tools to analyze data and create high-level graphics.</p> <p>This book covers the basics of R by setting up a user-friendly programming environment and performing data ETL in R. Data exploration examples are provided that demonstrate how powerful data visualization and machine learning is in discovering hidden relationships. You will then dive into important machine learning topics, including data classification, regression, clustering, association rule mining, and dimension reduction.</p>
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Machine Learning with R Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Resources for R and Machine Learning
Dataset – Survival of Passengers on the Titanic
Index

Getting a dataset for machine learning


While R has a built-in dataset, the sample size and field of application is limited. Apart from generating data within a simulation, another approach is to obtain data from external data repositories. A famous data repository is the UCI machine learning repository, which contains both artificial and real datasets. This recipe introduces how to get a sample dataset from the UCI machine learning repository.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have completed the previous recipes by installing R on your operating system.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to retrieve data for machine learning:

  1. Access the UCI machine learning repository: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/.

    UCI data repository

  2. Click on View ALL Data Sets. Here you will find a list of datasets containing field names, such as Name, Data Types, Default Task, Attribute Types, # Instances, # Attributes, and Year:

  3. Use Ctrl + F to search for Iris:

  4. Click on Iris. This will display the data folder and the dataset description:

  5. Click on Data Folder, which will display a directory containing the iris dataset:

  6. You can then either download iris.data or use the read.csv function to read the dataset:

    > iris.data = read.csv(url("http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/iris/iris.data"), header = FALSE,  col.names = c("Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width", "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width", "Species"))
    > head(iris.data)
      Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width   Species
    1         5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
    2         4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
    3         4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2 Iris-setosa
    4         4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2 Iris-setosa
    5         5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
    6         5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4 Iris-setosa
    

How it works...

Before conducting data analysis, it is important to collect your dataset. However, to collect an appropriate dataset for further exploration and analysis is not easy. We can, therefore, use the prepared dataset with the UCI repository as our data source. Here, we first access the UCI dataset repository and then use the iris dataset as an example. We can find the iris dataset by using the browser's find function (Ctrl + F), and then enter the file directory. Last, we can download the dataset and use the R IO function, read.csv, to load the iris dataset into an R session.

See also