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

Comparisons with bagging


When comparing the random forest results with the bagging counterpart for the German credit data and Pima Indian Diabetes datasets, we did not see much improvement in the accuracy over the validated partition of the data. A potential reason might be that the variability reduction achieved by bagging is at the optimum reduced variance, and that any bias improvement will not lead to an increase in the accuracy.

We consider a dataset to be available from the R core package kernlab. The dataset is spam and it has a collection of 4601 emails with labels that state whether the email is spam or non-spam. The dataset has a good collection of 57 variables derived from the email contents. The task is to build a good classifier for the spam identification problem. The dataset is quickly partitioned into training and validation partitions, as with earlier problems:

> data("spam")
> set.seed(12345)
> Train_Test <- sample(c("Train","Test"),nrow(spam),replace = TRUE,...