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

Evaluation


The evaluation phase is the one where we look for a validation of the results coming from our modeling activities. This phase can be split into two main questions:

  • Is the model performing adequately?
  • Is the model answering the questions originally posed?

The first of the two questions involves the identification of a proper set of metrics to establish if the model developed possesses the desired properties.

Following previously-shown model families, we are going to show you here how to overcome the following problems:

  • Clustering evaluation
  • Classification evaluation
  • Regression evaluation
  • Anomaly detection evaluation

Clustering evaluation

It is quite easy to understand how to evaluate the effectiveness of a clustering model. Since the objective of a clustering model is to divide a population into a given number of similar elements, evaluation of these kinds of models necessarily goes through the definition of some kind of an ideal clustering, even if defined by human judgment. Evaluating...