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

Finding highly correlated features with the caret package


When performing regression or classification, some models perform better if highly correlated attributes are removed. The caret package provides the findCorrelation function, which can be used to find attributes that are highly correlated to each other. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to find highly correlated features using the caret package.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will continue to use the telecom churn dataset as the input data source to find highly correlated features.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to find highly correlated attributes:

  1. Remove the features that are not coded in numeric characters:
        > new_train = trainset[,! names(churnTrain) %in% c("churn",
        "international_plan", "voice_mail_plan")]
  1. Then, you can obtain the correlation of each attribute:
        >cor_mat = cor(new_train)  
  1. Next, we use findCorrelation to search for highly correlated attributes with a cut off equal to 0...