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

Business case


For this chapter, we will stick to cancer--prostate cancer in this case. It is a small dataset of 97 observations and nine variables but allows you to fully grasp what is going on with regularization techniques by allowing a comparison with traditional techniques. We will start by performing best subsets regression to identify the features and use this as a baseline for our comparison.

Business understanding

The Stanford University Medical Center has provided preoperative Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) data on 97 patients who are about to undergo radical prostatectomy (complete prostate removal) for the treatment of prostate cancer. The American Cancer Society (ACS) estimates that nearly 30,000 American men died of prostate cancer in 2014 (http://www.cancer.org/). PSA is a protein that is produced by the prostate gland and is found in the bloodstream. The goal is to develop a predictive model of PSA among the provided set of clinical measures. PSA can be an effective prognostic...