Book Image

Hands-On Data Science with R

By : Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta, Doug Ortiz, Nataraj Dasgupta, Ricardo Anjoleto Farias
Book Image

Hands-On Data Science with R

By: Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta, Doug Ortiz, Nataraj Dasgupta, Ricardo Anjoleto Farias

Overview of this book

R is the most widely used programming language, and when used in association with data science, this powerful combination will solve the complexities involved with unstructured datasets in the real world. This book covers the entire data science ecosystem for aspiring data scientists, right from zero to a level where you are confident enough to get hands-on with real-world data science problems. The book starts with an introduction to data science and introduces readers to popular R libraries for executing data science routine tasks. This book covers all the important processes in data science such as data gathering, cleaning data, and then uncovering patterns from it. You will explore algorithms such as machine learning algorithms, predictive analytical models, and finally deep learning algorithms. You will learn to run the most powerful visualization packages available in R so as to ensure that you can easily derive insights from your data. Towards the end, you will also learn how to integrate R with Spark and Hadoop and perform large-scale data analytics without much complexity.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Forecasting machine learning application

The following section shows how to create an R application to perform forecasting on pharmaceutical medicine sales data using information obtained from NHS (UK) General Practitioner (GP) datasets, available at https://bit.ly/2Fxw9x4.

The dataset contains GP prescription data, which lists the medications that were prescribed by physicians to patients in the UK. Using the historical data for sales, we will attempt to predict future sales, both by quantity and revenue:

For the benefit of the readers, we have already provided a smaller version of the data in our code repository. Note that the application uses sophisticated and elegant customisations. This has been achieved using custom CSS styles and different API libraries. The user may want to ensure that all the libraries are installed prior to executing the code. For the benefit of the...