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 a user-based collaborative filtering technique


The Jokes recommendation system we built earlier, with item-based filtering, uses the powerful recommenderlab library available in R. In this implementation of the user-based collaborative filtering (UBCF) approach, we make use of the same library.

The following diagram shows the working principle of UBCF:

Example depicting working principle of user based collaborative filter

To understand the concept better, let's discuss the preceding diagram in detail. Let's assume that there are three users: X,Y, and Z. In UBCF, users X and Z are very similar as both of them like strawberries and watermelons. User X also likes grapes and oranges. So a user-based collaborative filter recommends grapes and oranges to user Z. The idea is that similar people tend to like similar things.

The primary difference between a user-based collaborative filter and an item-based collaborative filter is demonstrated by the following recommendation...