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

Predicting the energy efficiency of buildings


In this section, we will investigate how neural networks can be used to solve a real-world regression problem. Once again, we turn to the UCI Machine Learning Repository for our dataset. We've chosen to try out the energy efficiency dataset available at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Energy+efficiency. The prediction task is to use various building characteristics, such as surface area and roof area, in order to predict the energy efficiency of a building, which is expressed in the form of two different metrics--heating load and cooling load.

This is a good example for us to try out as we can demonstrate how neural networks can be used to predict two different outputs with a single network. The full attribute description of the dataset is given in the following table:

Column name

Type

Definition

relCompactness

Numerical

Relative compactness

surfArea

Numerical

Surface area

wallArea

Numerical

Wall area

roofArea

Numerical...