Book Image

R Machine Learning Essentials

By : Michele Usuelli
Book Image

R Machine Learning Essentials

By: Michele Usuelli

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (15 chapters)
R Machine Learning Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Step 1 – Data Exploration and Feature Engineering

There are different kinds of problems that require a machine learning solution. For instance, our target can be forecasting future outcomes or identifying patterns from the data. The starting point is a set of objects (for example, items) or people (for example, customers of a supermarket). In most situations, a machine learning technique identifies the solution, starting from some features that describe objects/people. The features are numeric and/or categorical attributes, and they are the base of the machine learning model. Having the right features will improve the performance and accuracy of the model, so it is extremely important to define some features that are relevant to the problem.

In this chapter, you will:

  • Build machine learning solutions

  • Build a feature data

  • Clean the data

  • Explore the defined features

  • Modify the features

  • Rank the features using a filter