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

The mlr Package


Now, we shall go into learning how the mlr package offers a complete framework to work with many machine learning models and problem. Often, in many ML projects, one has to manage an overwhelming amount of detailing around numerous experiments (also called trial-and-error iterations). Each experiment consists of many pieces of training using different machine learning algorithms, performance measures, hyperparameters, resampling techniques and predictions. Unless we do not systematically analyze the information obtained in each experiment, we will not be able to come out with the best combination of parameter values.

Another advantage of using the mlr package comes from its rich collection of machine learning algorithms from various packages. We do not have to install multiple packages for different implementation of the machine learning algorithm anymore. Instead, mlr offers everything in one place. To understand this better, refer to the following table:

Figure 9.3: The mlr...