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

Chapter 6. Support Vector Machines

In this chapter, we are going to take a fresh look at nonlinear predictive models by introducing support vector machines. Support vector machines, often abbreviated as SVMs, are very commonly used for classification problems, although there are certainly ways to perform function approximation and regression tasks with them. In this chapter, we will focus on the more typical case of their role in classification. To do this, we'll first present the notion of maximal margin classification, which presents an alternative formulation of how to choose between many possible classification boundaries and differs from approaches we have seen thus far, such as maximum likelihood. We'll introduce the related idea of support vectors and how, together with maximal margin classification, we can obtain a linear model in the form of a support vector classifier. Finally, we'll present how we can generalize these ideas in order to introduce nonlinearity through the use of...