Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with R

By : Eric Mayor
Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with R

By: Eric Mayor

Overview of this book

This book is packed with easy-to-follow guidelines that explain the workings of the many key data mining tools of R, which are used to discover knowledge from your data. You will learn how to perform key predictive analytics tasks using R, such as train and test predictive models for classification and regression tasks, score new data sets and so on. All chapters will guide you in acquiring the skills in a practical way. Most chapters also include a theoretical introduction that will sharpen your understanding of the subject matter and invite you to go further. The book familiarizes you with the most common data mining tools of R, such as k-means, hierarchical regression, linear regression, association rules, principal component analysis, multilevel modeling, k-NN, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, and text mining. It also provides a description of visualization techniques using the basic visualization tools of R as well as lattice for visualizing patterns in data organized in groups. This book is invaluable for anyone fascinated by the data mining opportunities offered by GNU R and its packages.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Learning Predictive Analytics with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Exercises and Solutions
Index

Agglomerative clustering with hclust()


In what follows, we are going to explore the use of agglomerative clustering with hclust() using numerical and binary data in two datasets.

Exploring the results of votes in Switzerland

In this section, we will examine the case of another dataset. This dataset represents the percentage of acceptance of the themes of federal (national) voting objects in Switzerland in 2001. The first rows of data are in the following table. The rows represent the cantons (the Swiss name for states). The columns (except the first) represent the topic of the voting. The values are the percentage of acceptance of the topic of voting. The data has been retrieved from the Swiss Statistics Office (www.bfs.admin.ch) and are provided in the folder for this chapter (file swiss_votes.dat).

The first five rows of the dataset

To load the data, save the file in your working directory or change the working directory (use setwd() to the path of the file) and type the following line of...