Book Image

R Data Science Essentials

Book Image

R Data Science Essentials

Overview of this book

With organizations increasingly embedding data science across their enterprise and with management becoming more data-driven it is an urgent requirement for analysts and managers to understand the key concept of data science. The data science concepts discussed in this book will help you make key decisions and solve the complex problems you will inevitably face in this new world. R Data Science Essentials will introduce you to various important concepts in the field of data science using R. We start by reading data from multiple sources, then move on to processing the data, extracting hidden patterns, building predictive and forecasting models, building a recommendation engine, and communicating to the user through stunning visualizations and dashboards. By the end of this book, you will have an understanding of some very important techniques in data science, be able to implement them using R, understand and interpret the outcomes, and know how they helps businesses make a decision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
R Data Science Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Segmentation Using Clustering

Clustering is often considered a classic example of unsupervised learning. It is a method of dividing the dataset into multiple groups where the objects in the same group will be more similar to each other than those in the other groups.

Clustering algorithms are generally used on unlabeled datasets; hence, there is no way to measure the clustering output. The user, based on his requirement, should consider the variables carefully so that the resultant clusters closely match with the user's requirement.

The greatest example for the clustering algorithms would be a search engine where the pages that are closely related to each other are shown together and the pages that are different are kept apart as far as possible. The most important factor here is to measure the similarity or dissimilarity between the objects.

Some of the problems that can be solved through the implementation of clustering algorithms are the predicting of a disease in the medical...