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

Building a recommendation system with an item-based collaborative filtering technique


The recommenderlab package of R offers the item-based collaborative filtering (ITCF) option to build a recommendation system. This is a very straightforward approach that just needs us to call the function and supply it with the necessary parameters. The parameters, in general, will have a lot of influence on the performance of the model; therefore, testing each parameter combination is the key to obtaining the best model for recommendations. The following are the parameters that can be passed to the Recommender function:

  • Data normalization: Normalizing the ratings matrix is a key step in preparing the data for the recommendation engine. The process of normalization processes the ratings in the matrix by removing the rating bias. The possible values for this parameter are NULL, Center, and Z-Score.
  • Distance: This represents the type of similarity metric to be used within the model. The possible values for...