Book Image

Data Science for Marketing Analytics

By : Tommy Blanchard, Debasish Behera, Pranshu Bhatnagar
Book Image

Data Science for Marketing Analytics

By: Tommy Blanchard, Debasish Behera, Pranshu Bhatnagar

Overview of this book

Data Science for Marketing Analytics covers every stage of data analytics, from working with a raw dataset to segmenting a population and modeling different parts of the population based on the segments. The book starts by teaching you how to use Python libraries, such as pandas and Matplotlib, to read data from Python, manipulate it, and create plots, using both categorical and continuous variables. Then, you'll learn how to segment a population into groups and use different clustering techniques to evaluate customer segmentation. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll explore ways to evaluate and select the best segmentation approach, and go on to create a linear regression model on customer value data to predict lifetime value. In the concluding chapters, you'll gain an understanding of regression techniques and tools for evaluating regression models, and explore ways to predict customer choice using classification algorithms. Finally, you'll apply these techniques to create a churn model for modeling customer product choices. By the end of this book, you will be able to build your own marketing reporting and interactive dashboard solutions.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Data Science for Marketing Analytics
Preface

Random Forest


The decision tree algorithm that we saw earlier faced the problem of overfitting. Since we fit only one tree on the training data, there is a high chance that the tree will overfit the data without proper pruning. The random forest algorithm reduces variance/overfitting by averaging multiple decision trees, which individually suffer from high variance.

Random forest is an ensemble method of supervised machine learning. Ensemble methods combine predictions obtained from multiple base estimators/classifiers to improve the overall prediction/robustness. Ensemble methods are divided into the following two types:

  • Bagging: The data is randomly divided into several subsets and the model is trained over each of these subsets. Several estimators are built independently from each other and then the predictions are averaged together, which ultimately helps to reduce variance (overfitting).

  • Boosting: In the case of boosting, base estimators are built sequentially and each model built is...