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

Getting Started with the Use Case


In this chapter, we will refer to the rainfall prediction problem using the weather dataset, obtained from the Australian Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology and made available through R. The dataset has two target variables, RainTomorrow, a flag indicating whether it will rain tomorrow, and RISK_MM, which measures the amount of rainfall for the following day.

In a nutshell, we can use this dataset for regression as well as classification, since we have two target variables. However, we will drop the continuous target variable and only consider the categorical target variable, RainTomorrow, for our classification exercise. The metadata and additional details about the dataset are available to explore at https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/rattle/versions/5.2.0/topics/weather. Since the dataset is readily available through R, we don't need to separately download it; instead, we can directly use the R function within the rattle library to load the data into...