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

Plotting the data using lattice


The lattice package is a useful package to learn, especially for analysts who like to work in formula notation (y~x).

In this example, we will run a lattice plot in order to plot Not.Covered.Pct on the y-axis, Year on the x-axis, and produce separate plots by category.

The main call is specified by the following:

xyplot(Not.Covered.Pct ~ Year | cat, data = x3)

Since we are plotting the top 10 groups, we can specify layout=c(5,2) to indicate we want to arrange the 10 plots in a 5*2 matrix. Not.Covered.Pct is to be arranged on the y axis (left side of the ~ sign), and Year is arranged along the x-axis (right side of ~ sign). The bar (|) indicates that the data is to be plotted separately by each category:

library(lattice)
x.tick.number <- 14
at <- seq(1, nrow(x3), length.out = x.tick.number)
labels <- round(seq(1999, 2012, length.out = x.tick.number))

p <- xyplot(Not.Covered.Pct ~ Year | cat, data = x3, type = "l", main = list(label = "Enrollment by...