Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

This book will teach you advanced techniques in machine learning with the latest code in R 3.3.2. You will delve into statistical learning theory and supervised learning; design efficient algorithms; learn about creating Recommendation Engines; use multi-class classification and deep learning; and more. You will explore, in depth, topics such as data mining, classification, clustering, regression, predictive modeling, anomaly detection, boosted trees with XGBOOST, and more. More than just knowing the outcome, you’ll understand how these concepts work and what they do. With a slow learning curve on topics such as neural networks, you will explore deep learning, and more. By the end of this book, you will be able to perform machine learning with R in the cloud using AWS in various scenarios with different datasets.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Packt Upsell
Customer Feedback
Preface
16
Sources

Ensembles


The quote at the beginning of this chapter mentions using ensembles to win machine learning competitions. However, they do have practical applications. I've provided a definition of what ensemble modeling is, but why does it work? To demonstrate this, I've co-opted an example, from the following blog, which goes into depth at a number of ensemble methods:http://mlwave.com/kaggle-ensembling-guide/.

As I write this chapter, we are only a couple of days away from Super Bowl 51, the Atlanta Falcons versus the New England Patriots. Let's say we want to review our probability of winning a friendly wager where we want to take the Patriots minus the points (3 points as of this writing). Assume that we have been following three expert prognosticators that all have the same probability of predicting that the Patriots will cover the spread (60%). Now, if we favor any one of the so-called experts, it is clear we have a 60% chance to win. However, let's see what creating an ensemble of their...