Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By : Brett Lantz
Book Image

Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By: Brett Lantz

Overview of this book

Machine learning, at its core, is concerned with transforming data into actionable knowledge. R offers a powerful set of machine learning methods to quickly and easily gain insight from your data. Machine Learning with R, Third Edition provides a hands-on, readable guide to applying machine learning to real-world problems. Whether you are an experienced R user or new to the language, Brett Lantz teaches you everything you need to uncover key insights, make new predictions, and visualize your findings. This new 3rd edition updates the classic R data science book to R 3.6 with newer and better libraries, advice on ethical and bias issues in machine learning, and an introduction to deep learning. Find powerful new insights in your data; discover machine learning with R.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Machine Learning with R - Third Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
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Index

Example – performing OCR with SVMs


Image processing is a difficult task for many types of machine learning algorithms. The relationships linking patterns of pixels to higher concepts are extremely complex and hard to define. For instance, it's easy for a human being to recognize a face, a cat, or the letter "A", but defining these patterns in strict rules is difficult. Furthermore, image data is often noisy. There can be many slight variations in how the image was captured depending on the lighting, orientation, and positioning of the subject.

SVMs are well suited to tackle the challenges of image data. Capable of learning complex patterns without being overly sensitive to noise, they are able to recognize visual patterns with a high degree of accuracy. Moreover, the key weakness of SVMs—the black box model representation—is less critical for image processing. If an SVM can differentiate a cat from a dog, it does not matter much how it is doing so.

In this section, we will develop a model...