Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By : James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte
Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By: James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte

Overview of this book

R offers a free and open source environment that is perfect for both learning and deploying predictive modeling solutions. With its constantly growing community and plethora of packages, R offers the functionality to deal with a truly vast array of problems. The book begins with a dedicated chapter on the language of models and the predictive modeling process. You will understand the learning curve and the process of tidying data. Each subsequent chapter tackles a particular type of model, such as neural networks, and focuses on the three important questions of how the model works, how to use R to train it, and how to measure and assess its performance using real-world datasets. How do you train models that can handle really large datasets? This book will also show you just that. Finally, you will tackle the really important topic of deep learning by implementing applications on word embedding and recurrent neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have explored and tested the most popular modeling techniques in use on real- world datasets and mastered a diverse range of techniques in predictive analytics using R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Predictive Analytics with R Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Dimensionality Reduction
Index

A path forward


So, the inkling of having more than enough data for training a model seems very appealing.

Big data sources would appear to answer this desire, however in practice, a big data source is not often (if ever) analyzed in its entirety. You can pretty much count on performing a sweeping filtering process aimed to reduce the big data into small(er) data (more on this in the next section).

In the following section, we will review various approaches to addressing the various challenges of using big data as a source for your predictive analytics project.

Opportunities

In this section, we offer a few recommendations for handling big data sources in predictive analytic projects using R. Also, we'll offer some practical use case examples.

Bigger data, bigger hardware

We are starting with the most obvious option first.

To be clear, R keeps all of its objects in memory, which is a limitation if the data source gets too large. One of the easiest ways to deal with big data in R is simply to increase...