A quick introduction to machine learning in R with caret

If you've been using R for a while, and you've been working with basic data visualization and data exploration techniques, the next logical step is to start learning some machine learning. To help you begin learning about machine learning in R, I'm going to introduce you to an R package: the caret package. We'll build a very simple machine learning model as a way to learn some of caret's basic syntax and functionality. But before diving into caret, let's quickly discuss what machine learning is and why we use it. Machine learning is the study of data-driven, computational methods for making inferences and predictions.