Book Image

Machine Learning with R

By : Brett Lantz
Book Image

Machine Learning with R

By: Brett Lantz

Overview of this book

Machine learning, at its core, is concerned with transforming data into actionable knowledge. This fact makes machine learning well-suited to the present-day era of "big data" and "data science". Given the growing prominence of R—a cross-platform, zero-cost statistical programming environment—there has never been a better time to start applying machine learning. Whether you are new to data science or a veteran, machine learning with R offers a powerful set of methods for quickly and easily gaining insight from your data. "Machine Learning with R" is a practical tutorial that uses hands-on examples to step through real-world application of machine learning. Without shying away from the technical details, we will explore Machine Learning with R using clear and practical examples. Well-suited to machine learning beginners or those with experience. Explore R to find the answer to all of your questions. How can we use machine learning to transform data into action? Using practical examples, we will explore how to prepare data for analysis, choose a machine learning method, and measure the success of the process. We will learn how to apply machine learning methods to a variety of common tasks including classification, prediction, forecasting, market basket analysis, and clustering. By applying the most effective machine learning methods to real-world problems, you will gain hands-on experience that will transform the way you think about data. "Machine Learning with R" will provide you with the analytical tools you need to quickly gain insight from complex data.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Machine Learning with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
9
Finding Groups of Data – Clustering with k-means
Index

Exploring and understanding data


After collecting data and loading it into R data structures, the next step in the machine learning process involves examining the data in detail. It is during this step that you will begin to explore the data's features and examples, and realize the peculiarities that make your data unique. The better you understand your data, the better you will be able to match a machine learning model to your learning problem.

The best way to understand the process of data exploration is by example. In this section, we will explore the usedcars.csv dataset, which contains actual data about used cars recently advertised for sale on a popular U.S. website.

Tip

The usedcars.csv dataset is available for download on Packt's website. If you are following along with the examples, be sure that this file has been downloaded and saved to your R working directory.

Since the dataset is stored in CSV form, we can use the read.csv() function to load the data into an R data frame:

usedcars...