Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)
Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)

Overview of this book

Big data has become a popular buzzword across many industries. An increasing number of people have been exposed to the term and are looking at how to leverage big data in their own businesses, to improve sales and profitability. However, collecting, aggregating, and visualizing data is just one part of the equation. Being able to extract useful information from data is another task, and a much more challenging one. Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition uses a practical approach to teach you how to perform machine learning with R. Each chapter is divided into several simple recipes. Through the step-by-step instructions provided in each recipe, you will be able to construct a predictive model by using a variety of machine learning packages. In this book, you will first learn to set up the R environment and use simple R commands to explore data. The next topic covers how to perform statistical analysis with machine learning analysis and assess created models, covered in detail later on in the book. You'll also learn how to integrate R and Hadoop to create a big data analysis platform. The detailed illustrations provide all the information required to start applying machine learning to individual projects. With Machine Learning with R Cookbook, machine learning has never been easier.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Obtaining the optimum number of clusters for k-means


While k-means clustering is fast and easy to use, it requires k to be the input at the beginning. Therefore, we can use the sum of squares to determine which k value is best for finding the optimum number of clusters for k-means. In the following recipe, we will discuss how to find the optimum number of clusters for the k-means clustering method.

Getting ready

In order to find the optimum number of clusters, you need to have the previous recipe completed by generating the customer dataset.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to find the optimum number of clusters for the k-means clustering:

  1. First, calculate the within sum of squares (withinss) of different numbers of clusters:
        > nk = 2:10
        > set.seed(22)
        > WSS = sapply(nk, function(k) {
        +     kmeans(customer, centers=k)$tot.withinss
        + })
        > WSS
        Output
        [1] 123.49224  88.07028  61.34890  48.76431  47.20813
     ...