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

Chapter 5. The Bare Bones Boosting Algorithms

What do we mean by bare bones boosting algorithms? The boosting algorithm (and its variants) is arguably one of the most important algorithms in the machine learning toolbox. Any data analyst needs to know this algorithm, and eventually the push for higher accuracy invariably drives towards the need for the boosting technique. It has been reported on the www.kaggle.org forums that boosting algorithms for complex and voluminous data run for several weeks and that most award-winning solutions are based on this. Furthermore, the algorithms run on modern graphical device machines.

Taking its importance into account, we will study the boosting algorithm in detail here. Bare bones is certainly not a variant of the boosting algorithm. Since the boosting algorithm is one of the very important and vital algorithms, we will first state the algorithm and implement it in a rudimentary fashion, which will show each step of the algorithm in action.

We will begin...