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

Machine learning or deep learning


With machine learning, algorithm options are selected and used to analyze data and data sources and, rather than make decisions on them, they learn from them so that they can use patterns or results found in the data to make decisions or predictions about a certain topic, or to solve a specific problem.

What this translates to is that instead of you programming or writing out each rule and instruction that needs to be used for a specific task such as making a prediction, the computer is trained using large amounts of data and algorithms which give it the ability to actually learn how to perform a task, make a prediction, solve a problem, or meet an objective in mind.

Note

Just how much data qualifies as enough data for successful machine learning?

Usually the bigger, the better, but in practice, you must gather a sufficient amount of data, based upon your intended purpose or need. Given a shortage of quantity, the wise data scientist should always focus on...