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

Summary


This concludes this chapter, and this book. I started off by saying that this was a different kind of predictive analytics book, and I covered many different kinds of topics, from both a technical and conceptual viewpoint. I hope that you have learned a lot from this and that it has given you some new algorithms to use, and has taught you something about some 'older' tools, such as SQL, which are very capable of doing some of the heavy lifting that is sometimes needed. I also tried to emphasis 'small data', metadata, and sampling in the hopes that that will aid you in understand your data better, just by virtue of being able to look at individual pieces separately. I also hope that some of the material in the book will enable you to work collaboratively with different team members having different skill sets. That could be anything from someone who is an expert in optimizing code, or someone who is an expert in statistics, or even someone who has worked with all of the key people...