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

Random forest


Like our motivation with the use of the Gower metric in handling mixed, in fact, messy data, we can apply random forest in an unsupervised fashion. Selecting this method has a number of advantages:

  • Robust against outliers and highly skewed variables
  • No need to transform or scale the data
  • Handles mixed data (numeric and factors)
  • Can accommodate missing data
  • Can be used on data with a large number of variables; in fact, it can be used to eliminate useless features by examining variable importance
  • The dissimilarity matrix produced serves as an input to the other techniques discussed earlier (hierarchical, k-means, and PAM)

A couple of words of caution. It may take some trial and error to properly tune the random forest with respect to the number of variables sampled at each tree split (mtry = ? in the function) and the number of trees grown. Studies done show that the more trees grown, up to a point, provide better results, and a good starting point is to grow 2,000 trees (Shi, T. &amp...