Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By : Cory Lesmeister
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning with R - Third Edition

By: Cory Lesmeister

Overview of this book

Given the growing popularity of the R-zerocost statistical programming environment, there has never been a better time to start applying ML to your data. This book will teach you advanced techniques in ML ,using? the latest code in R 3.5. You will delve into various complex features of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning algorithms to design efficient and powerful ML models. This newly updated edition is packed with fresh examples covering a range of tasks from different domains. Mastering Machine Learning with R starts by showing you how to quickly manipulate data and prepare it for analysis. You will explore simple and complex models and understand how to compare them. You’ll also learn to use the latest library support, such as TensorFlow and Keras-R, for performing advanced computations. Additionally, you’ll explore complex topics, such as natural language processing (NLP), time series analysis, and clustering, which will further refine your skills in developing applications. Each chapter will help you implement advanced ML algorithms using real-world examples. You’ll even be introduced to reinforcement learning, along with its various use cases and models. In the concluding chapters, you’ll get a glimpse into how some of these blackbox models can be diagnosed and understood. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills to deploy ML techniques in your own projects or at work.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Summary

This chapter looked at the common problems in large, messy datasets common in machine learning projects. These include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Missing or invalid values
  • Novel levels in a categorical feature that show up in algorithm production
  • High cardinality in categorical features such as zip code
  • High dimensionality
  • Duplicate observations

This chapter provided a disciplined approach to dealing with these problems by showing how to explore the data, treat it, and create a dataframe that you can use for developing your learning algorithm. It's also flexible enough that you can modify the code to suit your circumstances. This methodology should make what many feels is the most arduous, time-consuming, and least enjoyable part of the job an easy task.

With this task behind us, we can now get started on our first modeling task using linear regression in the following chapter.