Book Image

Regression Analysis with R

By : Giuseppe Ciaburro
Book Image

Regression Analysis with R

By: Giuseppe Ciaburro

Overview of this book

Regression analysis is a statistical process which enables prediction of relationships between variables. The predictions are based on the casual effect of one variable upon another. Regression techniques for modeling and analyzing are employed on large set of data in order to reveal hidden relationship among the variables. This book will give you a rundown explaining what regression analysis is, explaining you the process from scratch. The first few chapters give an understanding of what the different types of learning are – supervised and unsupervised, how these learnings differ from each other. We then move to covering the supervised learning in details covering the various aspects of regression analysis. The outline of chapters are arranged in a way that gives a feel of all the steps covered in a data science process – loading the training dataset, handling missing values, EDA on the dataset, transformations and feature engineering, model building, assessing the model fitting and performance, and finally making predictions on unseen datasets. Each chapter starts with explaining the theoretical concepts and once the reader gets comfortable with the theory, we move to the practical examples to support the understanding. The practical examples are illustrated using R code including the different packages in R such as R Stats, Caret and so on. Each chapter is a mix of theory and practical examples. By the end of this book you will know all the concepts and pain-points related to regression analysis, and you will be able to implement your learning in your projects.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Discretization in R


Discretization techniques can be used to convert continuous attributes to nominal attributes. In this way, the number of values for a given continuous attribute is reduced by dividing the attribute into a range of values. Actual data values are replaced with interval value labels.

Machine-learning algorithms are typically recursive; to process large amounts of data a great deal of time is spent to sort the data at every step. It is clear that the smaller the number of distinct values to be ordered, the faster these methods should be. That is why these techniques are particularly beneficial.

In discretization, the raw values of a numeric attribute are replaced by labels or conceptual labels. For example, the continuous value of the measured temperature in one day can be divided into three bins (0-10, 11-20, 21-30) or can be divided into the three conceptual labels (low, medium, high).

There are several discretization techniques including the following:

  • Data discretization...