Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By : Cory Lesmeister
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By: Cory Lesmeister

Overview of this book

Given the growing popularity of the R-zerocost statistical programming environment, there has never been a better time to start applying ML to your data. This book will teach you advanced techniques in ML ,using? the latest code in R 3.5. You will delve into various complex features of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning algorithms to design efficient and powerful ML models. This newly updated edition is packed with fresh examples covering a range of tasks from different domains. Mastering Machine Learning with R starts by showing you how to quickly manipulate data and prepare it for analysis. You will explore simple and complex models and understand how to compare them. You’ll also learn to use the latest library support, such as TensorFlow and Keras-R, for performing advanced computations. Additionally, you’ll explore complex topics, such as natural language processing (NLP), time series analysis, and clustering, which will further refine your skills in developing applications. Each chapter will help you implement advanced ML algorithms using real-world examples. You’ll even be introduced to reinforcement learning, along with its various use cases and models. In the concluding chapters, you’ll get a glimpse into how some of these blackbox models can be diagnosed and understood. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills to deploy ML techniques in your own projects or at work.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Cluster Analysis

"Quickly bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever."
- Aristophanes, Athenian Playwright

In the earlier chapters, we focused on trying to learn the best algorithm in order to solve an outcome or response, for example, customer satisfaction or home prices. In all these cases, we had y, and that y is a function of x, or y = f(x). In our data, we had the actual y values and we could train x accordingly. This is referred to as supervised learning. However, there are many situations where we try to learn something from our data, and either we do not have the y, or we actually choose to ignore it. If so, we enter the world of unsupervised learning. In this world, we build and select our algorithm based on how well it addresses our business needs versus how accurate it is.

Why would we try and learn without supervision? First...