Caret Package - A Practical Guide to Machine Learning in R

Caret Package is a comprehensive framework for building machine learning models in R. In this tutorial, I explain nearly all the core features of the caret package and walk you through the step-by-step process of building predictive models. Be it a decision tree or xgboost, caret helps to find the optimal model in the shortest possible time. Caret nicely integrates all the activities associated with the model development in a streamlined workflow, for nearly every major ML algorithm available in R. Actually we will not just stop with the caret package but will also go a step ahead and see how to smartly ensemble predictions from multiple best models and possibly produce an even better prediction using caretEnsemble. Caret is short for Classification And REgression Training. With R having so many implementations of machine learning algorithms, spread across packages it may be challenging to keep track of which algorithm resides in which package. Sometimes the syntax and the way to implement the algorithm differ across packages combined with preprocessing and looking at the help page for the hyperparameters (parameters that define how the algorithm learns) can make building predictive models an involved task. Well, thanks to caret because no matter which package the algorithm resides, caret will remember that for you and may just prompt you to run install.package Later in this tutorial I will show how to see all the available ML algorithms supported by caret (it's a long list!) and what hyperparameters can be tuned.