In the past few years, the number of people entering the field of data science has increased drastically because of higher salaries, an increasing job market, and more demand. Undoubtedly, there are unlimited programs to learn data science, several companies offering in-depth Data Science Bootcamp, and a ton of channels on YouTube that are covering data science content. The abundance of data science content can easily confuse one with where to begin or how to start their data science career. To ease this data science journey for beginners, intermediate, or starters, we are going to list a couple of data science tutorials, crash courses, webinars, and videos. The aim of this blog is to help beginners navigate their data science path, and also help them to determine if data science is the most perfect career choice for them or not.

R is a programming language used mainly in statistics, but it also provides valid libraries for Machine Learning. In this tutorial, I describe how to implement a classification task using the caret package provided by R. The objective of this example is to predict heart attacks through a K-Neighbors Classifier. The example uses the hearts dataset, available on Kaggle under the CC0 Public Domain license. In my previous articles, I have already analyzed this dataset in Python both using scikit-learn and pycaret. In this article, I try to solve the same problem in R. As input features, I consider all the columns but the last one is named output, which I consider as target class.

What started out as a Google Summer of Code is now known as the swiss army knife in the ML world, as it applies to most projects. Based on the survey, it was the top ML framework used, with over 80% of data scientists using it. Developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain team, TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source platform for machine learning. It has a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries, and community resources that lets researchers push the state-of-the-art in ML and developers easily build and deploy ML-powered applications. It's also robust and can be easily trained and deployed in the cloud, in browsers, or even on-device in multiple languages. It is an optimized distributed gradient boosting library designed to be highly efficient, flexible, and portable.

The output shows that the values of the various variables are not standardized. For example, the V14 variables, which is our target variable, it holds only 2 values, either 0 or 1. Instead, this should be a categorical variable.

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.

Extreme Gradient Boosting is among the hottest libraries in supervised machine learning these days. It supports various objective functions, including regression, classification, and ranking. It has gained much popularity and attention recently as it was the algorithm of choice for many winning teams of a number of machine learning competitions. What makes it so popular are its speed and performance. It gives among the best performances in many machine learning applications.

Over the last 12 months, I have been participating in a number of machine learning hackathons on Analytics Vidhya and Kaggle competitions. After the competition, I always make sure to go through winner's solution. The winner's solution usually provide me critical insights, which have helped me immensely in future competitions. Most of the winners rely on an ensemble of well-tuned individual models along with feature engineering. If you are starting with machine learning, I would advise you to lay emphasis on these two areas as I have found them equally important to do well in a machine learning.

In last week's post I explored whether machine learning models can be applied to predict flu deaths from the 2013 outbreak of influenza A H7N9 in China. There, I compared random forests, elastic-net regularized generalized linear models, k-nearest neighbors, penalized discriminant analysis, stabilized linear discriminant analysis, nearest shrunken centroids, single C5.0 tree and partial least squares. Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is a faster and improved implementation of gradient boosting for supervised learning and has recently been very successfully applied in Kaggle competitions. Because I've heard XGBoost's praise being sung everywhere lately, I wanted to get my feet wet with it too. So this week I want to compare the prediction success of gradient boosting with the same dataset.

As Google learned, predicting the spread of influenza, even with mountains of data, is notoriously difficult. Nonetheless, bioinformatician and R user Shirin Glander has created a two-part tutorial about predicting flu deaths with R (part 2 here). The analysis is based on just 136 cases of influenza A H7N9 in China in 2013 (data provided in the outbreaks package) so the intent was not to create a generally predictive model, but by providing all of the R code and graphics Shirin has created a useful example of real-word predictive modeling with R. The tutorial covers loading and cleaning the data (including a nice example of using the mice package to impute missing values) and begins with some exploratory data visualizations. I was particularly impressed by the use of density charts (using the stat_density2d ggplot2 aesthetic) to highlight differences in the scatterplots of flu cases ending in death and recovery. Decision trees (implemented using rpart and visualized using fancyRpartPlot from the rattle package) Random Forests (using caret's "rf" training method) Elastic-Net Regularized Generalized Linear Models (using caret's "glmnet" training method) K-nearest neighbors clustering (using caret's "kknn" training method) Penalized Discriminant Analysis (using caret's "pda" training method) and in Part 2, Extreme gradient boosting using the xgboost package and various preprocessing techniques from the caret package Due to the limited data size, there's not too much difference between the models: in each case, 13-15 of the 23 cases were classified correctly.

You cannot get better at it by reading books and blog posts. In this post, you will discover the simple 6-step machine learning project template that you can use to jump-start your project in R. Machine Learning Project Template in R Photo by Jaguar MENA, some rights reserved. Working through machine learning problems from end-to-end is critically important. You can read about machine learning. You can also try out small one-off recipes. But applied machine learning will not come alive for you until you work through a dataset from beginning to end.