Machine learning algorithms are parameterized so that they can be best adapted for a given problem. A difficulty is that configuring an algorithm for a given problem can be a project in and of itself. Like selecting ‘the best’ algorithm for a problem you cannot know before hand which algorithm parameters will be best for […]
The caret package in R is designed to streamline the process of applied machine learning. A key part of solving data problems in understanding the data that you have available. You can do this very quickly by summarizing the attributes with data visualizations. There are a lot of packages and functions for summarizing data in […]
The R platform for statistical computing is perhaps the most popular and powerful platform for applied machine learning. The caret package in R has been called “R’s competitive advantage“. It makes the process of training, tuning and evaluating machine learning models in R consistent, easy and even fun. In this post you will discover the […]
Machine Learning can be difficult to understand when getting started. There are a lot of algorithms and processes that are prescribed and used, many with difficult to penetrate explanations for how and why the work. It can feel overwhelming. An approach that you can use to get handle on machine learning algorithms and practices is […]
The book Applied Predictive Modeling teaches practical machine learning theory with code examples in R. It is an excellent book and highly recommended to machine learning practitioners and users of R for machine learning. In this post you will discover the benefits of this book and how it can help you become a better machine […]
R is the most popular platform for applied machine learning. When you want to get serious with applied machine learning you will find your way into R. It is very powerful because so many machine learning algorithms are provided. A problem is that the algorithms are all provided by third parties, which makes their usage […]
When you are building a predictive model, you need a way to evaluate the capability of the model on unseen data. This is typically done by estimating accuracy using data that was not used to train the model such as a test set, or using cross validation. The caret package in R provides a number […]
There are a lot of blogs and videos on machine learning and more being created every day, week and month. If you are working or at school, it can feel overwhelming to keep up with some much material. Worse, you feel like you will be at some great disadvantage if you do miss something. In […]
Optimization is a big part of machine learning. It is the core of most popular methods, from least squares regression to artificial neural networks. In this post you will discover recipes for 5 optimization algorithms in R. These methods might be useful in the core of your own implementation of a machine learning algorithm. You […]
In this post you will discover 7 recipes for non-linear classification with decision trees in R. All recipes in this post use the iris flowers dataset provided with R in the datasets package. The dataset describes the measurements if iris flowers and requires classification of each observation to one of three flower species. Let’s get […]
