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 8. Dimensionality Reduction

Building a useful predictive model requires analyzing an appropriate number of observations (or cases). This number will vary, based upon your project or your objective. Strictly speaking, the more variations (not necessarily the more data) analyzed, the better the outcome or results of the model.

This chapter will discuss the concept of reducing the size or amount of the data being observed without affecting the outcome of the analysis (or the success of the project), through various common approaches such as correlation analysis, principal component analysis, independent component analysis, common factor analysis, and non-negative matrix factorization.

Let us begin by clarifying what is meant by dimensional reduction.