Thorough coverage, from the ground up, of tree-based methods (e.g., CART, conditional inference trees, bagging, boosting, and random forests). A companion website containing additional supplementary material and the code to reproduce every example and figure in the book. A companion R package, called treemisc, which contains several data sets and functions used throughout the book (e.g., there's an implementation of gradient tree boosting with LAD loss that shows how to perform the line search step by updating the terminal node estimates of a fitted rpart tree). Interesting examples that are of practical use; for example, how to construct partial dependence plots from a fitted model in Spark MLlib (using only Spark operations), or post-processing tree ensembles via the LASSO to reduce the number of trees while maintaining, or even improving performance.

Hands-on Machine Learning with R provides a practical and applied approach to learning and developing intuition into today's most popular machine learning methods. This book serves as a practitioner's guide to the machine learning process and is meant to help the reader learn to apply the machine learning stack within R, which includes using various R packages such as glmnet, h2o, ranger, xgboost, keras, and others to effectively model and gain insight from their data. The book favors a hands-on approach, providing an intuitive understanding of machine learning concepts through concrete examples and just a little bit of theory. Throughout this book, the reader will be exposed to the entire machine learning process including feature engineering, resampling, hyperparameter tuning, model evaluation, and interpretation. The reader will be exposed to powerful algorithms such as regularized regression, random forests, gradient boosting machines, deep learning, generalized low rank models, and more! By favoring a hands-on approach and using real word data, the reader will gain an intuitive understanding of the architectures and engines that drive these algorithms and packages, understand when and how to tune the various hyperparameters, and be able to interpret model results. By the end of this book, the reader should have a firm grasp of R's machine learning stack and be able to implement a systematic approach for producing high quality modeling results. Features: * Offers a practical and applied introduction to the most popular machine learning methods. * Topics covered include feature engineering, resampling, deep learning and more. * Uses a hands-on approach and real world data.