Mastering Predictive Analytics with R

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the fundamental ideas surrounding predictive models. We saw that there are many ways to categorize models, learning important distinctions in the process, such as supervised versus unsupervised learning and regression versus classification. Next, we outlined the steps involved in building a predictive model, starting from the process of data collection all the way to model evaluation and deployment. Critically, this process is an iterative one, and most often we arrive at our final model after having tried out and trained a number of different models. In order to compare the performance of the different models that we create, we established some fundamental notions of model performance, such as the mean squared ...