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

Chapter 9. Linear Regression

In Chapter 7, Exploring Association Rules with Apriori, we examined association rules with apriori. In the previous chapter, we have notably examined statistical distribution and the relationships between two attributes using several measures of association. These didn't infer any causation between the attributes, only dependence. If we have normally distributed attributes and want to examine how one attribute affects another attribute, we can rely on simple linear regression instead. If we want to examine how several attributes affect an attribute, we can rely on multiple linear regressions.

In this chapter, we will notably:

  • Build and use our own simple linear regression algorithm

  • Create multiple linear regression models in R

  • Perform diagnostic tests of such models

  • Score new data using a linear regression model

  • Examine how well the model predicts the new data

  • Have a quick look at robust regression and bootstrapping