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


Random forests were created as an improvement on the bagging method. As an example of the homogeneous ensemble method, we saw how the forests help in obtaining higher accuracy. Visualization and variable importance for random forests were thoroughly detailed. We also saw a lot of diagnostic methods that can be used after fitting a random forest. The method was then compared with bagging. Novel applications of random forest for missing data imputation and cluster analysis were also demonstrated.

In the next chapter, we will look at boosting, which is a very important ensemble.