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

Ensembles


The quote at the beginning of this chapter mentions using ensembles to win machine learning competitions. However, they do have practical applications. I've provided a definition of what ensemble modeling is, but why does it work? To demonstrate this, I've co-opted an example from the following blog, which goes into depth at a number of ensemble methods: http://mlwave.com/kaggle-ensembling-guide/.

As I write this chapter, we're only a day away from the 2018 College Football Championship—the Clemson Tigers versus the Alabama Crimson Tide. Let's say we want to review our probability of winning a friendly wager where we want to take the Tide minus the points (5.5 points at the time of writing).

Assume that we've been following three expert prognosticators who said, All have the same probability of predicting that the Patriots will cover the spread (60%). Now, if we favor any one of the so-called experts, it's clear that we have a 60% chance of winning. However, let's see what creating...