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

Introduction to neural networks


Neural network is a fairly broad term that covers a number of related methods but, in our case, we will focus on a feedforward network that trains with backpropagation. I'm not going to waste our time discussing how the machine learning methodology is similar or dissimilar to how a biological brain works. We only need to start with a working definition of what a neural network is.

Note

To know more about artificial neural networks, I think the Wikipedia entry is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network.

To summarize, in machine learning and cognitive science, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a family of statistical learning models inspired by biological neural networks (the central nervous systems of animals, the brain) and are used to estimate or approximate functions that can depend on a large number of inputs and are generally unknown.

The motivation or benefit of ANNs is that they allow the modeling of highly complex relationships...