Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)
Book Image

Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)

Overview of this book

Big data has become a popular buzzword across many industries. An increasing number of people have been exposed to the term and are looking at how to leverage big data in their own businesses, to improve sales and profitability. However, collecting, aggregating, and visualizing data is just one part of the equation. Being able to extract useful information from data is another task, and a much more challenging one. Machine Learning with R Cookbook, Second Edition uses a practical approach to teach you how to perform machine learning with R. Each chapter is divided into several simple recipes. Through the step-by-step instructions provided in each recipe, you will be able to construct a predictive model by using a variety of machine learning packages. In this book, you will first learn to set up the R environment and use simple R commands to explore data. The next topic covers how to perform statistical analysis with machine learning analysis and assess created models, covered in detail later on in the book. You'll also learn how to integrate R and Hadoop to create a big data analysis platform. The detailed illustrations provide all the information required to start applying machine learning to individual projects. With Machine Learning with R Cookbook, machine learning has never been easier.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Clustering data with hierarchical clustering


Hierarchical clustering adopts either an agglomerative or divisive method to build a hierarchy of clusters. Regardless of which approach is adopted, both first use a distance similarity measure to combine or split clusters. The recursive process continues until there is only one cluster left or you cannot split more clusters. Eventually, we can use a dendrogram to represent the hierarchy of clusters. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to cluster customers with hierarchical clustering.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will perform hierarchical clustering on customer data, which involves segmenting customers into different groups. You can download the data from this GitHub page: https://github.com/ywchiu/ml_R_cookbook/tree/master/CH9.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to cluster customer data into a hierarchy of clusters:

  1. First, you need to load data from customer.csv and save it into customer:
    > customer= read.csv('customer.csv...