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

Summary


In this chapter, we took a second stab at unsupervised learning techniques by exploring PCA, examining what it is, and applying it in a practical fashion. We explored how it can be used to reduce the dimensionality and improve the understanding of the dataset when confronted with numerous highly correlated variables. Then, we applied it to real data of anthropometric measurements of US Army soldiers, using the resulting principal components in a regression analysis with MARS to predict a soldier's weight. Additionally, we explored ways to visualize the data and model results.

As an unsupervised learning technique, it requires some judgment along with trial and error to arrive at an optimal solution that is acceptable to business partners. Nevertheless, it is a powerful tool to extract latent insights and to support supervised learning.

In the next chapter, we will examine using unsupervised learning to look at association analysis.