Book Image

R Data Mining

Book Image

R Data Mining

Overview of this book

R is widely used to leverage data mining techniques across many different industries, including finance, medicine, scientific research, and more. This book will empower you to produce and present impressive analyses from data, by selecting and implementing the appropriate data mining techniques in R. It will let you gain these powerful skills while immersing in a one of a kind data mining crime case, where you will be requested to help resolving a real fraud case affecting a commercial company, by the mean of both basic and advanced data mining techniques. While moving along the plot of the story you will effectively learn and practice on real data the various R packages commonly employed for this kind of tasks. You will also get the chance of apply some of the most popular and effective data mining models and algos, from the basic multiple linear regression to the most advanced Support Vector Machines. Unlike other data mining learning instruments, this book will effectively expose you the theory behind these models, their relevant assumptions and when they can be applied to the data you are facing. By the end of the book you will hold a new and powerful toolbox of instruments, exactly knowing when and how to employ each of them to solve your data mining problems and get the most out of your data. Finally, to let you maximize the exposure to the concepts described and the learning process, the book comes packed with a reproducible bundle of commented R scripts and a practical set of data mining models cheat sheets.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
14
Epilogue

Chapter 1. Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start

 Since this is our first step on the journey to R knowledge, we have to be sure to acquire all the tools and notions we will use on our trip. You are probably already an R enthusiast and would like to discover more about it, but maybe you are not so sure why you should invest time in learning it. Perhaps you lack confidence in defining its points of strength and weakness, and therefore you are not sure it is the right language to bet on. Crucially, you do not actually know where and how to practically begin your journey to R mastery. The good news, is you will not have to wait long to solve all of these issues, since this first chapter is all about them.

In particular, within this chapter we will:

  • Look at the history of R to understand where everything came from
  • Analyze R's points of strength, understanding why it is a savvy idea to learn this programming language
  • Learn how to install the R language on your computer and how to write and run R code
  • Gain an understanding of the R language and the foundation notions needed to start writing R scripts
  • Understand R's points of weakness and how to work around them

By the end of the chapter, we will have all the weapons needed to face our first real data mining problem.