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

Starting the project


The phases of a general purpose predictive analytics project may be straightforward and perhaps easy (it's the practice of carrying out each of these phases effectively that is challenging).

The Phases of a predictive analytics project

These phases are:

  1. Define (the data).

  2. Profile & Prepare (the data).

  3. Determine the Question (what to predict).

  4. Choose the algorithm.

  5. Apply the model.

Data definition

An interesting thought:

"…Once you have enough data, you start to see patterns," he said. "You can build a model of how these data work. Once you build a model, you can predict…"

– Bertolucci, 2013

At the beginning of any (and every) analytics project, data is defined – reviewed and analyzed: source, format, state, interval, and so on (some refer to this as the process of investigating the breadth and depth of available data).

One exercise demanded is to perform what is referred to as profiling...