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

The xgboost package


The xgboost R package is an optimized, distributed implementation of the gradient boosting method. This is an engineering optimization that is known to be efficient, flexible, and portable—see https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost for more details and regular updates. This provides parallel tree boosting, and therefore has been found to be immensely useful in the data science community. This is especially the case given that a great fraction of the competition winners at www.kaggle.org use the xgboost technique. A partial list of Kaggle winners is available at https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/tree/master/demo#machine-learning-challenge-winning-solutions.

The main advantages of the extreme gradient boosting implementation are shown in the following:

  • Parallel computing: This package is enabled with parallel processing using OpenMP, which then uses all the cores of the computing machine

  • Regularization: This helps in circumventing the problem of overfitting by incorporating the regularization...