Book Image

Practical Predictive Analytics

By : Ralph Winters
Book Image

Practical Predictive Analytics

By: Ralph Winters

Overview of this book

This is the go-to book for anyone interested in the steps needed to develop predictive analytics solutions with examples from the world of marketing, healthcare, and retail. We'll get started with a brief history of predictive analytics and learn about different roles and functions people play within a predictive analytics project. Then, we will learn about various ways of installing R along with their pros and cons, combined with a step-by-step installation of RStudio, and a description of the best practices for organizing your projects. On completing the installation, we will begin to acquire the skills necessary to input, clean, and prepare your data for modeling. We will learn the six specific steps needed to implement and successfully deploy a predictive model starting from asking the right questions through model development and ending with deploying your predictive model into production. We will learn why collaboration is important and how agile iterative modeling cycles can increase your chances of developing and deploying the best successful model. We will continue your journey in the cloud by extending your skill set by learning about Databricks and SparkR, which allow you to develop predictive models on vast gigabytes of data.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Splitting the data into train and test datasets


Proceed to create our test and train datasets. The objective will be to sample 80% of the data for the training set and 20% of the data for the test data set.

To speed up sampling somewhat, we can sequentially sample the tails of the sample_bin range for the test dataset and then use the middle for the training data. This is still a random sample, since sample_bin was originally generated randomly and the sequence or range of the numbers have no bearing on the randomness.

Generating the training datasets

Since we want 80% of our data to be training data, first take all of the sample_bin numbers which lie between the high and low cutoff values. We can define the cutoff range as 20% of the difference between the highest and lowest value of sample_bin.

Set the low cutoff as the lowest value plus the cutoff range defined previously, and the high cutoff as the highest value minus the cutoff range:

#compute the minimum and maximum values of sample bin...