Book Image

Advanced Machine Learning with R

By : Cory Lesmeister, Dr. Sunil Kumar Chinnamgari
Book Image

Advanced Machine Learning with R

By: Cory Lesmeister, Dr. Sunil Kumar Chinnamgari

Overview of this book

R is one of the most popular languages when it comes to exploring the mathematical side of machine learning and easily performing computational statistics. This Learning Path shows you how to leverage the R ecosystem to build efficient machine learning applications that carry out intelligent tasks within your organization. You’ll work through realistic projects such as building powerful machine learning models with ensembles to predict employee attrition. Next, you’ll explore different clustering techniques to segment customers using wholesale data and even apply TensorFlow and Keras-R for performing advanced computations. Each chapter will help you implement advanced machine learning algorithms using real-world examples. You’ll also be introduced to reinforcement learning along with its use cases and models. Finally, this Learning Path will provide you with a glimpse into how some of these black box models can be diagnosed and understood. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to deploy machine learning techniques in your own projects.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Preparing and Understanding Data

"We've got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that's our lifeblood."

– Billy Beane, General Manager Oakland Athletics, subject of the book Moneyball

Research consistently shows that machine learning and data science practitioners spend most of their time manipulating data and preparing it for analysis. Indeed, many find it the most tedious and least enjoyable part of their work. Numerous companies are offering solutions to the problem but, in my opinion, results at this point are varied. Therefore, in this first chapter, I shall endeavor to provide a way of tackling the problem that will ease the burden of getting your data ready for machine learning. The methodology introduced in this chapter will serve as the foundation for data preparation and for understanding many of the subsequent chapters. I propose that once you become comfortable with this tried and true process, it may very well become your favorite part of machine learning—as it is for me.

The following are the topics that we'll cover in this chapter:

  • Overview 
  • Reading the data
  • Handling duplicate observations
  • Descriptive statistics
  • Exploring categorical variables
  • Handling missing values
  • Zero and near-zero variance features
  • Treating the data
  • Correlation and linearity