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

6.4 RANDOM FORESTS

CART and C5.0 both produce a single decision tree based on all of the records, and the specified variables, in the training data set. There is, however, a method that uses multiple trees, where the output of each tree is considered when determining the final classification of each record.

Random forests 6 build a series of decision trees and combine the trees disparate classifications of each record into one final classification. Random forests are an example of an ensemble method. Ensemble methods are a category of modeling techniques that take multiple models' output into account in order to arrive at a single answer. Different ensemble methods take the models' output into consideration in different ways. For more about ensemble methods, please see our earlier text.7

The random forests algorithm begins building each decision tree by taking a random sample, with replacement, from the original training data set. In this way, each tree will have a different...