Book Image

Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Frequently the tool of choice for academics, R has spread deep into the private sector and can be found in the production pipelines at some of the most advanced and successful enterprises. The power and domain-specificity of R allows the user to express complex analytics easily, quickly, and succinctly. Starting with the basics of R and statistical reasoning, this book dives into advanced predictive analytics, showing how to apply those techniques to real-world data though with real-world examples. Packed with engaging problems and exercises, this book begins with a review of R and its syntax with packages like Rcpp, ggplot2, and dplyr. From there, get to grips with the fundamentals of applied statistics and build on this knowledge to perform sophisticated and powerful analytics. Solve the difficulties relating to performing data analysis in practice and find solutions to working with messy data, large data, communicating results, and facilitating reproducibility. This book is engineered to be an invaluable resource through many stages of anyone’s career as a data analyst.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


At a high level, in this chapter you learned about four of the most popular classifiers out there: k-Nearest Neighbors, logistic regression, decision trees, and random forests. Not only did you learn the basics and mechanics of these four algorithms, but you saw how easy they were to perform in R. Along the way, you learned about confusion matrices, hyper-parameter tuning, and maybe even a few new R incantations.

We also visited some more general ideas; for example, you've expanded your understanding of the bias-variance trade-off, looked at how the GLM can perform great feats, and have become acquainted with ensemble learning and bootstrap aggregation. It's also my hope that you've developed some intuition as to which classifiers to use in different situations. Finally, given that we couldn't achieve perfect classification on our diabetes dataset, I hope that you've gained an appreciation for the art and difficulty of classification. Perhaps you've even caught the statistical learning...