Book Image

R Machine Learning By Example

By : Raghav Bali
Book Image

R Machine Learning By Example

By: Raghav Bali

Overview of this book

Data science and machine learning are some of the top buzzwords in the technical world today. From retail stores to Fortune 500 companies, everyone is working hard to making machine learning give them data-driven insights to grow their business. With powerful data manipulation features, machine learning packages, and an active developer community, R empowers users to build sophisticated machine learning systems to solve real-world data problems. This book takes you on a data-driven journey that starts with the very basics of R and machine learning and gradually builds upon the concepts to work on projects that tackle real-world problems. You’ll begin by getting an understanding of the core concepts and definitions required to appreciate machine learning algorithms and concepts. Building upon the basics, you will then work on three different projects to apply the concepts of machine learning, following current trends and cover major algorithms as well as popular R packages in detail. These projects have been neatly divided into six different chapters covering the worlds of e-commerce, finance, and social-media, which are at the very core of this data-driven revolution. Each of the projects will help you to understand, explore, visualize, and derive insights depending upon the domain and algorithms. Through this book, you will learn to apply the concepts of machine learning to deal with data-related problems and solve them using the powerful yet simple language, R.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
R Machine Learning By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding recommendation systems


Every individual in unique, the way we do things is what defines us uniquely. We eat, walk, talk, and even shop in a very unique way. Since the focus of this chapter is e-commerce, we will focus mostly on our shopping behaviors. We will utilize each customer's unique behavior to provide a personalized shopping experience.

To accomplish the task of providing a personalized shopping experience, we need a system to understand and model our customers. Recommendation engines are the systems which learn about customer preferences, choices, and so on, to recommend new products which are closer to what the user might have purchased themselves, thus providing a personalized experience. The options presented by such systems would have a high probability of the customer purchasing them.

Let us try to formally define a recommendation system.

Recommendation systems (or recommender engines) are a class of information filtering systems which analyze the input data to predict...