Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

This book will teach you advanced techniques in machine learning with the latest code in R 3.3.2. You will delve into statistical learning theory and supervised learning; design efficient algorithms; learn about creating Recommendation Engines; use multi-class classification and deep learning; and more. You will explore, in depth, topics such as data mining, classification, clustering, regression, predictive modeling, anomaly detection, boosted trees with XGBOOST, and more. More than just knowing the outcome, you’ll understand how these concepts work and what they do. With a slow learning curve on topics such as neural networks, you will explore deep learning, and more. By the end of this book, you will be able to perform machine learning with R in the cloud using AWS in various scenarios with different datasets.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Packt Upsell
Customer Feedback
Preface
16
Sources

Data preparation


Almost there! This step has the following five tasks:

  1. Selecting the data.
  2. Cleaning the data.
  3. Constructing the data.
  4. Integrating the data.
  5. Formatting the data.

These tasks are relatively self-explanatory. The goal is to get the data ready to input in the algorithms. This includes merging, feature engineering, and transformations. If imputation is needed, then it happens here as well. Additionally, with R, pay attention to how the outcome needs to be labeled. If your outcome/response variable is Yes/No, it may not work in some packages and will require a transformed or no variable with 1/0. At this point, you should also break your data into the various test sets if applicable: train, test, or validate. This step can be an unmitigated burden, but most experienced people will tell you that it is where you can separate yourself from your peers. With this, let's move on to the payoff, where you earn your money.