Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By : Brett Lantz
Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By: Brett Lantz

Overview of this book

Machine learning, at its core, is concerned with transforming data into actionable knowledge. R offers a powerful set of machine learning methods to quickly and easily gain insight from your data. Machine Learning with R, Third Edition provides a hands-on, readable guide to applying machine learning to real-world problems. Whether you are an experienced R user or new to the language, Brett Lantz teaches you everything you need to uncover key insights, make new predictions, and visualize your findings. This new 3rd edition updates the classic R data science book to R 3.6 with newer and better libraries, advice on ethical and bias issues in machine learning, and an introduction to deep learning. Find powerful new insights in your data; discover machine learning with R.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Machine Learning with R - Third Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Index

Improving the performance of R


Base R has a reputation for being slow and memory inefficient, a reputation that is at least somewhat earned. These faults are largely unnoticed on a modern PC for datasets of many thousands of records, but datasets with a million records or more can exceed the limits of what is currently possible with consumer-grade hardware. The problem is worsened if the dataset contains many features or if complex learning algorithms are being used.

Note

CRAN has a high-performance computing task view that lists packages pushing the boundaries on what is possible in R at http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html.

Packages that extend R past the capabilities of the base package are being developed rapidly. This work comes primarily on two fronts: some packages add the capability to manage extremely large datasets by making data operations faster or by allowing the size of data to exceed the amount of available system memory; others allow R to work faster...