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

The biological neuron


Neural network models draw their analogy from the organization of neurons in the human brain, and for this reason they are also often referred to as artificial neural networks (ANNs) to distinguish them from their biological counterparts. The key parallel is that a single biological neuron acts as a simple computational unit, but when a large number of these are combined together, the result is an extremely powerful and massively distributed processing machine capable of complex learning, known more commonly as the human brain. To get an idea of how neurons are connected in the brain, the following image shows a simplified picture of a human neural cell:

In a nutshell, we can think of a human neuron as a computational unit that takes in a series of parallel electrical signal inputs known as synaptic neurotransmitters coming in from the dendrites. The dendrites transmit signal chemicals to the soma or body of the neuron in response to the received synaptic neurotransmitters...