Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - 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 understanding


For this example, we will delve into the world of sports; in particular, the National Hockey League (NHL). Much work has been done on baseball (think of the book and movie, Moneyball) and football; both are American and games that people around the world play with their feet. For my money, there is no better spectator sport than hockey. Perhaps that is an artifact of growing up on the frozen prairie of North Dakota. Nonetheless, we can consider this analysis as our effort to start a MoneyPuck movement.

In this analysis, we will look at the statistics for 30 NHL teams in a data set I've compiled from www.nhl.com and www.puckalytics.com. The goal is to build a model that predicts the total points for a team from an input feature space developed using PCA in order to provide us with some insight on what it takes to be a top professional team. We will learn a model from the 2015-16 season, which saw the Pittsburgh Penguins crowned as champions, and then test its performance...