Book Image

R Data Mining

Book Image

R Data Mining

Overview of this book

R is widely used to leverage data mining techniques across many different industries, including finance, medicine, scientific research, and more. This book will empower you to produce and present impressive analyses from data, by selecting and implementing the appropriate data mining techniques in R. It will let you gain these powerful skills while immersing in a one of a kind data mining crime case, where you will be requested to help resolving a real fraud case affecting a commercial company, by the mean of both basic and advanced data mining techniques. While moving along the plot of the story you will effectively learn and practice on real data the various R packages commonly employed for this kind of tasks. You will also get the chance of apply some of the most popular and effective data mining models and algos, from the basic multiple linear regression to the most advanced Support Vector Machines. Unlike other data mining learning instruments, this book will effectively expose you the theory behind these models, their relevant assumptions and when they can be applied to the data you are facing. By the end of the book you will hold a new and powerful toolbox of instruments, exactly knowing when and how to employ each of them to solve your data mining problems and get the most out of your data. Finally, to let you maximize the exposure to the concepts described and the learning process, the book comes packed with a reproducible bundle of commented R scripts and a practical set of data mining models cheat sheets.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
14
Epilogue

Extracting data from a PDF file in R


I don't know whether you are aware of this, but our colleagues in the commercial department are used to creating a customer card for every customer they deal with. This is quite an informal document that contains some relevant information related to the customer, such as the industry and the date of foundation. Probably the most precious information contained within these cards is the comments they write down about the customers. Let me show you one of them:

My plan was the following—get the information from these cards and analyze it to discover whether some kind of common traits emerge.

As you may already know, at the moment this information is presented in an unstructured way; that is, we are dealing with unstructured data. Before trying to analyze this data, we will have to gather it in our analysis environment and give it some kind of structure.

Technically, what we are going to do here is called text mining, which generally refers to the activity of...