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

Summary


In this chapter, we studied linear regression, a method that allows us to fit a linear model in a supervised learning setting where we have a number of input features and a single numeric output. Simple linear regression is the name given to the scenario where we have only one input feature, and multiple linear regression describes the case where we have multiple input features. Linear regression is very commonly used as a first approach to solving a regression problem. It assumes that the output is a linear weighted combination of the input features in the presence of an irreducible error component that is normally distributed and has zero mean and constant variance. The model also assumes that the features are independent. The performance of linear regression can be assessed by a number of different metrics from the more standard MSE to others, such as the R2 statistic. We explored several model diagnostics and significance tests designed to detect problems from violated assumptions...