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)

Model training and evaluation

As mentioned previously, we'll be predicting customer satisfaction. The data is based on a former online competition. I've taken the training portion of the data and cleaned it up for our use.

A full description of the contest and the data is available at the following link: https://www.kaggle.com/c/santander-customer-satisfaction/data.

This is an excellent dataset for a classification problem for many reasons. Like so much customer data, it's very messy— especially before I removed a bunch of useless features (there was something like four dozen zero variance features). As discussed in the prior two chapters, I addressed missing values, linear dependencies, and highly correlated pairs. I also found the feature names lengthy and useless, so I coded them V1 through V142. The resulting data deals with what's usually a difficult...