Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By : Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose
Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By: Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose

Overview of this book

Data science is hot. Bloomberg named a data scientist as the ‘hottest job in America’. Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools using which you can produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Each chapter in the book presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. You’ll learn how to prepare data, perform exploratory data analysis, and prepare to model the data. As you progress, you’ll explore what are decision trees and how to use them. You’ll also learn about model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, and neural networks. The later chapters provide comprehensive information about clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. The book also throws light on exciting new topics, such as random forests and general linear models. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to start providing solutions to data science problems using R and Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
17
INDEX
18
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

14.4 MINING ASSOCIATION RULES

So, let us get our hands dirty mining for association rules using the Churn_Training_File data set. Prepare by doing the following:

  • Subset the following variables into their own data frame: VMail Plan, Intl Plan, CustServ Calls, and Churn.
  • Set CustServ Calls to be an ordinal factor.

Let us begin by finding the “baseline” proportions for the various variables, so that we may later check the confidence levels of our association rules against these baseline levels. These proportions may be found in Figures 14.1 and 14.2. For example, the proportion of customers who churn is 14.53%.

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Figure 14.1 Proportions for International Plan, Voicemail Plan, and Churn from R.

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Figure 14.2 Proportions for Customer Service Calls from R.

Now, let us generate some association rules, using the following settings:

  • Specify the type of association to obtain as “rules”
  • Minimum support equals 0.01 (1%)
  • Minimum confidence equals 0.4 (40%)
  • Maximum...