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

Business understanding and recommendations


This business case is a joke, literally. Maybe it is more appropriate to say a bunch of jokes, as we will use the Jester5k data from the recommenderlab package. This data consists of 5,000 ratings on 100 jokes sampled from the Jester Online Joke Recommender System. It was collected between April 1999 and May 2003, and all the users have rated at least 36 jokes (Goldberg, Roeder, Gupta, and Perkins, 2001). Our goal is to compare the recommendation algorithms and select the best one.

As such, I believe it is important to lead off with a statistical joke to put one in the proper frame of mind. I'm not sure of how to properly provide attribution for this one, but it is popular all over the Internet.

A statistician's wife had twins. He was delighted. He rang the minister who was also delighted. "Bring them to church on Sunday and we'll baptize them", said the minister. "No", replied the statistician. "Baptize one. We'll keep the other as a control."