Book Image

Hands-On Ensemble Learning with R

By : Prabhanjan Narayanachar Tattar
Book Image

Hands-On Ensemble Learning with R

By: Prabhanjan Narayanachar Tattar

Overview of this book

Ensemble techniques are used for combining two or more similar or dissimilar machine learning algorithms to create a stronger model. Such a model delivers superior prediction power and can give your datasets a boost in accuracy. Hands-On Ensemble Learning with R begins with the important statistical resampling methods. You will then walk through the central trilogy of ensemble techniques – bagging, random forest, and boosting – then you'll learn how they can be used to provide greater accuracy on large datasets using popular R packages. You will learn how to combine model predictions using different machine learning algorithms to build ensemble models. In addition to this, you will explore how to improve the performance of your ensemble models. By the end of this book, you will have learned how machine learning algorithms can be combined to reduce common problems and build simple efficient ensemble models with the help of real-world examples.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Hands-On Ensemble Learning with R
Contributors
Preface
12
What's Next?
Index

Summary


Bagging is essentially an ensembling method that consists of homogeneous base learners. Bagging was introduced as a bootstrap aggregation method, and we saw some of the advantages of the bootstrap method in Chapter 2, Bootstrapping. The advantage of the bagging method is the stabilization of the predictions. This chapter began with modifications for the classification tree, and we saw different methods of improvising the performance of a decision tree so that the tree does not overfit the data. The bagging of the decision tress and the related tricks followed in the next section. We then introduced k-NN as an important classifier and illustrated it with a simple example. The chapter concluded with the bagging extension of the k-NN classifier.

Bagging helps in reducing the variance of the decision trees. However, the trees of the two bootstrap samples are correlated since a lot of common observations generate them. In the next chapter, we will look at innovative resampling, which will...