Book Image

Learning Bayesian Models with R

By : Hari Manassery Koduvely
Book Image

Learning Bayesian Models with R

By: Hari Manassery Koduvely

Overview of this book

Bayesian Inference provides a unified framework to deal with all sorts of uncertainties when learning patterns form data using machine learning models and use it for predicting future observations. However, learning and implementing Bayesian models is not easy for data science practitioners due to the level of mathematical treatment involved. Also, applying Bayesian methods to real-world problems requires high computational resources. With the recent advances in computation and several open sources packages available in R, Bayesian modeling has become more feasible to use for practical applications today. Therefore, it would be advantageous for all data scientists and engineers to understand Bayesian methods and apply them in their projects to achieve better results. Learning Bayesian Models with R starts by giving you a comprehensive coverage of the Bayesian Machine Learning models and the R packages that implement them. It begins with an introduction to the fundamentals of probability theory and R programming for those who are new to the subject. Then the book covers some of the important machine learning methods, both supervised and unsupervised learning, implemented using Bayesian Inference and R. Every chapter begins with a theoretical description of the method explained in a very simple manner. Then, relevant R packages are discussed and some illustrations using data sets from the UCI Machine Learning repository are given. Each chapter ends with some simple exercises for you to get hands-on experience of the concepts and R packages discussed in the chapter. The last chapters are devoted to the latest development in the field, specifically Deep Learning, which uses a class of Neural Network models that are currently at the frontier of Artificial Intelligence. The book concludes with the application of Bayesian methods on Big Data using the Hadoop and Spark frameworks.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Bayesian averaging


So far, we have learned that simply minimizing the loss function (or equivalently maximizing the log likelihood function in the case of normal distribution) is not enough to develop a machine learning model for a given problem. One has to worry about models overfitting the training data, which will result in larger prediction errors on new datasets. The main advantage of Bayesian methods is that one can, in principle, get away from this problem, without using explicit regularization and different datasets for training and validation. This is called Bayesian model averaging and will be discussed here. This is one of the answers to our main question of the chapter, why Bayesian inference for machine learning?

For this, let's do a full Bayesian treatment of the linear regression problem. Since we only want to explain how Bayesian inference avoids the overfitting problem, we will skip all the mathematical derivations and state only the important results here. For more details...