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

Running the initialization code


The initialization code merely sets some options for later use and has no real output. We will just print "Hello World" to make sure that it is working:

options(digits=3) 
options(repr.plot.width = 1000, repr.plot.height = 500, repr.plot.res = 144, repr.plot.pointsize = 5) 
rep_times=1000 
cat("Hello World")  

The output cell prints Hello World and also gives you the time it took to run, the username, time and time, as well as the cluster it ran on. Pay close attention to the length of time that each code chunk ran. It will be useful for benchmarking code at a later date.