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)

Tree-Based Classification

"The classifiers most likely to be the best are the random forest (RF) versions, the best of which (implemented in R and accessed via caret), achieves 94.1 percent of the maximum accuracy, overcoming 90 percent in 84.3 percent of the data sets."
- Fernández-Delgado et al. (2014)

This quote from Fernández-Delgado et al. in the Journal of Machine Learning Research is meant to demonstrate that the techniques in this chapter are quite powerful, particularly when used for classification problems.

In previous chapters, we examined techniques used to predict label classification on three different datasets. Here, we'll apply tree-based methods with an eye to see whether we can improve our predictive power on the Santander data used in Chapter 3, Logistic Regression, and the data used in Chapter 4, Advanced Feature Selection in Linear...