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

Polynomial regression


Polynomial regression is a kind of linear regression.

While linear regression is when both the predictor and the response are each continuous and linearly-related, causing the response to increase or decrease at a constant ratio to the predictor (that is, in a straight line), with polynomial regression, different powers of the predictor are successively added to see if they adjust the response significantly. As these increases are added to the equation, the line of data points will change its shape, turning the linear regression model from a best fitted line into a best fitted curve.

So, why should you bother with polynomial regression? The generally accepted answer or thought process is: when a linear model doesn't seem to be the best model for your data.

There are three main conditions that indicate a linear relationship may not be a good model for a use:

  • There will be some variable relationships in your data that you assume are curvilinear

  • During visual inspection of...