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

Model training and evaluation


As mentioned previously, we'll be predicting customer satisfaction. The data is based on a former online competition. I've taken the training portion of the data and cleaned it up for our use. 

Note

A full description of the contest and the data is available at the following link: https://www.kaggle.com/c/santander-customer-satisfaction/data.

This is an excellent dataset for a classification problem for many reasons. Like so much customer data, it's very messy— especially before I removed a bunch of useless features (there was something like four dozen zero variance features). As discussed in the prior two chapters, I addressed missing values, linear dependencies, and highly correlated pairs. I also found the feature names lengthy and useless, so I coded them V1 through V142. The resulting data deals with what's usually a difficult thing to measure: satisfaction. Because of proprietary methods, no description or definition of satisfaction is given.

 

 

Having worked...