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

Introduction


Clustering is a technique used to group similar objects (close in terms of distance) together in the same group (cluster). Unlike supervised learning methods (for example, classification and regression) covered in the previous chapters, a clustering analysis does not use any label information, but simply uses the similarity between data features to group them into clusters.

Clustering can be widely adapted in the analysis of businesses. For example, a marketing department can use clustering to segment customers by personal attributes. As a result of this, different marketing campaigns targeting various types of customers can be designed.

The four most common types of clustering methods are hierarchical clustering, k-means clustering, model-based clustering, and density-based clustering:

  • Hierarchical clustering: It creates a hierarchy of clusters, and presents the hierarchy in a dendrogram. This method does not require the number of clusters to be specified at the beginning.

  • k...