Book Image

Building a Recommendation System with R

Book Image

Building a Recommendation System with R

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Building a Recommendation System with R
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References
Index

Solving a data analysis problem


Any data analysis problem involves a series of steps such as:

  • Identifying a business problem.

  • Understanding the problem domain with the help of a domain expert.

  • Identifying data sources and data variables suitable for the analysis.

  • Data preprocessing or a cleansing step, such as identifying missing values, quantitative and qualitative variables and transformations, and so on.

  • Performing exploratory analysis to understand the data, mostly through visual graphs such as box plots or histograms.

  • Performing basic statistics such as mean, median, modes, variances, standard deviations, correlation among the variables, and covariance to understand the nature of the data.

  • Dividing the data into training and testing datasets and running a model using machine-learning algorithms with training datasets, using cross-validation techniques.

  • Validating the model using the test data to evaluate the model on the new data. If needed, improve the model based on the results of the validation...