Book Image

Practical Predictive Analytics

By : Ralph Winters
Book Image

Practical Predictive Analytics

By: Ralph Winters

Overview of this book

This is the go-to book for anyone interested in the steps needed to develop predictive analytics solutions with examples from the world of marketing, healthcare, and retail. We'll get started with a brief history of predictive analytics and learn about different roles and functions people play within a predictive analytics project. Then, we will learn about various ways of installing R along with their pros and cons, combined with a step-by-step installation of RStudio, and a description of the best practices for organizing your projects. On completing the installation, we will begin to acquire the skills necessary to input, clean, and prepare your data for modeling. We will learn the six specific steps needed to implement and successfully deploy a predictive model starting from asking the right questions through model development and ending with deploying your predictive model into production. We will learn why collaboration is important and how agile iterative modeling cycles can increase your chances of developing and deploying the best successful model. We will continue your journey in the cloud by extending your skill set by learning about Databricks and SparkR, which allow you to develop predictive models on vast gigabytes of data.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Simulating the data


Once we have calculated the mean values and covariance matrices for all of the columns, we are ready to simulate a big dataset for any number of observations we desire.

Which correlations to use?

For the covariance matrix, we can either use separate matrices for the two diabetes outcomes (1,0), or use a pooled covariance matrix, which shows the correlations among the variables regardless of the outcome.

We will use the separate correlation or covariance matrices since we have enough observations for each outcome (n=500 and n=268). If either of these classes were much smaller related to the other, we could use the pooled (or total) covariance matrix instead, since that would cover a larger set of observations.

Some notes on the code which follows:

  • As a reminder, always start with a random seed prior to a simulation. That will ensure that you get the same random results every time you run the code.
  • The cor() function will compute the correlation matrix among all of the variables...