Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with R

By : Karthik Ramasubramanian, Jojo Moolayil
Book Image

Applied Supervised Learning with R

By: Karthik Ramasubramanian, Jojo Moolayil

Overview of this book

R provides excellent visualization features that are essential for exploring data before using it in automated learning. Applied Supervised Learning with R helps you cover the complete process of employing R to develop applications using supervised machine learning algorithms for your business needs. The book starts by helping you develop your analytical thinking to create a problem statement using business inputs and domain research. You will then learn different evaluation metrics that compare various algorithms, and later progress to using these metrics to select the best algorithm for your problem. After finalizing the algorithm you want to use, you will study the hyperparameter optimization technique to fine-tune your set of optimal parameters. The book demonstrates how you can add different regularization terms to avoid overfitting your model. By the end of this book, you will have gained the advanced skills you need for modeling a supervised machine learning algorithm that precisely fulfills your business needs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Applied Supervised Learning with R
Preface

Ridge Regression


As we saw in linear regression, Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimates the value of in such a way that the sum of squares of residual is minimized.

Since is an estimate we compute from a given sample and it's not a true population parameter, we need to be careful of certain characteristics of an estimate. The two such primary characteristics are the bias and the variance.

If is the fit at the value of , then the average (or expected) on the test dataset could be decomposed into three quantities, the variance, the squared bias, and the variance of error terms as represented by the following equation:

For the best estimate, a suitable algorithm such as OLS should simultaneously achieve low bias and low variance. We commonly call this the Bias-Variance trade off. The popular bull's eye picture shown in the following figure helps understand the various scenarios of the tradeoff:

Figure 4.14: The popular bull's eye picture for explaining Bias and Variance scenarios

The bull's...