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

Poisson regression


Another form of regression analysis is Poisson regression. This type of analysis is a generalized linear model or GLM, used to model count data.

Unlike the example in the previous section where wine samples had been rated (or ranked) on a scale from 1 to 10, count data is a (statistical) data type in which the observations can take only the non-negative integer values {0, 1, 2, 3, ...}, and where these integers arise from counting rather than ranking.

Poisson regression assumes the outcome of your analysis has a Poisson distribution – in that it expresses: the probability of a number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since the last event.

An example model might be of the number of phone calls received by a software support center each hour. Predictors of the number of calls received include the number of days after a new version (of the software) has been released and the number of...