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


In this chapter, we extended most of the models and methods learned earlier in the book. The chapter began with a detailed example of housing data, and we carried out the visualization and pre-processing. The principal component method helps in reducing data, and the variable clustering method also helps with the same task. Linear regression models, neural networks, and the regression tree were then introduced as methods that will serve as base learners. Bagging, boosting, and random forest algorithms are some methods that helped to improve the models. These methods are based on homogeneous ensemble methods. This chapter then closed with the stacking ensemble method for the three heterogeneous base learners.

A different data structure of censored observations will be the topic of the next chapter. Such data is referred to as survival data, and it commonly appears in the study of clinical trials.