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

7.9 DATA‐DRIVEN ERROR COSTS

In this era of big data, businesses should leverage the information in their existing databases in order to help uncover the optimal predictive models. In other words, as an alternative to assigning error costs because “these cost values seem right to our consultant” or “that's how we have always modeled them,” we would instead be well advised to listen to the data and learn from the data itself what the error costs should be. Let us illustrate the power of data‐driven error costs by continuing our example.

Recall that our only nonzero costs were CostFP = $10 and CostTP =  − $40. Fortunately, however, we have access to data that would give us a better idea of CostTP, namely the predictor Sales per Visit. This predictor provides the average amount of money spent per visit for each customer. So, if we calculate the mean Sales per Visit across all customers, we could use this as a better estimate...