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

Defining a Sample Use Case


For the purpose of exploring topics in this chapter with a practical dataset, we use a small dataset already available in the mlbench package, called PimaIndiansDiabetes, which is a handy dataset for classification use cases.

The dataset is originally from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The use case that can be tailored from the dataset is when predicting if a patient has diabetes as a function of few medical diagnostic measurements.

Note

Additional information can be found at http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/courses/math47/R/library/mlbench/html/PimaIndiansDiabetes.html.

The selection of the use case with a dataset size of less than 1000 rows is intentional. The topics explored in this chapter require high computation time on commodity hardware for regular use cases with large datasets. The selection of small datasets for the purpose of demonstration helps in achieving the outcome with fairly normal computational time for most readers...