Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By : James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte
Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By: James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte

Overview of this book

R offers a free and open source environment that is perfect for both learning and deploying predictive modeling solutions. With its constantly growing community and plethora of packages, R offers the functionality to deal with a truly vast array of problems. The book begins with a dedicated chapter on the language of models and the predictive modeling process. You will understand the learning curve and the process of tidying data. Each subsequent chapter tackles a particular type of model, such as neural networks, and focuses on the three important questions of how the model works, how to use R to train it, and how to measure and assess its performance using real-world datasets. How do you train models that can handle really large datasets? This book will also show you just that. Finally, you will tackle the really important topic of deep learning by implementing applications on word embedding and recurrent neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have explored and tested the most popular modeling techniques in use on real- world datasets and mastered a diverse range of techniques in predictive analytics using R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Predictive Analytics with R Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Dimensionality Reduction
Index

Regularization


Variable selection is an important process, as it tries to make models simpler to interpret, easier to train, and free of spurious associations by eliminating variables unrelated to the output. This is one possible approach to dealing with the problem of overfitting. In general, we don't expect a model to completely fit our training data; in fact, the problem of overfitting often means that it may be detrimental to our predictive model's accuracy on unseen data if we fit our training data too well. In this section on regularization, we'll study an alternative to reducing the number of variables in order to deal with overfitting. Regularization is essentially the process of introducing an intentional bias or constraint in our training procedure that prevents our coefficients from taking large values. As this is a process that tries to shrink the coefficients, the methods we'll look at are also known as shrinkage methods.

Ridge regression

When the number of parameters is very...