This book is designed to be both a guide and a reference for moving beyond the basics of predictive modeling. The book begins with a dedicated chapter on the language of models and the predictive modeling process. Each subsequent chapter tackles a particular type of model, such as neural networks, and focuses on the three important questions of how the model works, how to use R to train it, and how to measure and assess its performance using real world data sets.
By the end of this book, you will have explored and tested the most popular modeling techniques in use on real world data sets and mastered a diverse range of techniques in predictive analytics.
Rui Miguel Forte is currently the chief data scientist at Workable. He was born and raised in Greece and studied in the UK. He is an experienced data scientist who has over 10 years of work experience in a diverse array of industries spanning mobile marketing, health informatics, education technology, and human resources technology. His projects include the predictive modeling of user behavior in mobile marketing promotions, speaker intent identification in an intelligent tutor, information extraction techniques for job applicant resumes, and fraud detection for job scams. Currently, he teaches R, MongoDB, and other data science technologies to graduate students in the business analytics MSc program at the Athens University of Economics and Business. In addition, he has lectured at a number of seminars, specialization programs, and R schools for working data science professionals in Athens. His core programming knowledge is in R and Java, and he has extensive experience working with a variety of database technologies, such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and HBase. He holds a master's degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Imperial College London and is currently researching machine learning applications in information extraction and natural language processing.