Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By : James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte
Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By: James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte

Overview of this book

R offers a free and open source environment that is perfect for both learning and deploying predictive modeling solutions. With its constantly growing community and plethora of packages, R offers the functionality to deal with a truly vast array of problems. The book begins with a dedicated chapter on the language of models and the predictive modeling process. You will understand the learning curve and the process of tidying data. Each subsequent chapter tackles a particular type of model, such as neural networks, and focuses on the three important questions of how the model works, how to use R to train it, and how to measure and assess its performance using real-world datasets. How do you train models that can handle really large datasets? This book will also show you just that. Finally, you will tackle the really important topic of deep learning by implementing applications on word embedding and recurrent neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have explored and tested the most popular modeling techniques in use on real- world datasets and mastered a diverse range of techniques in predictive analytics using R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Predictive Analytics with R Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Dimensionality Reduction
Index

Other approaches to recommendation systems


In this chapter, we concentrated our efforts on building recommendation systems by following the collaborative filtering paradigm. This is a very popular approach due to its many advantages. By essentially mimicking word-of-mouth recommendations, it requires virtually no knowledge about the items being recommended nor any background about the users in question.

Moreover, collaborative filtering systems incorporate new ratings as they arise, either through a memory approach, or via the regular retraining of a model-based approach. Thus, they naturally become better for their users over time as they learn more information and adapt to changing preferences. On the other hand, they are not without their disadvantages, not the least of which is the fact that they will not take into account any information about the items and their content even when it is available.

Content-based recommendation systems try to suggest items to users that are similar to...