Using R to illustrate boosting methods
In order to further illustrate the use of boosting, we should have an example.
In this section, we'll take a high-level look at a thought-provoking prediction problem drawn from Mastering Predictive Analytics with R, Second Edition, James D. Miller and Rui Miguel Forte, August 2017 (https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/mastering-predictive-analytics-r-second-edition).
In this original example, patterns made by radiation on a telescope camera are analyzed in an attempt to predict whether a certain pattern came from gamma rays leaking into the atmosphere or from regular background radiation.
Gamma rays leave distinctive elliptical patterns and so we can create a set of features to describe these. The dataset used is the MAGIC Gamma Telescope Data Set, hosted by the UCI Machine Learning Repository at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/MAGIC+Gamma+Telescope.
This data consists of 19,020 observations, holding the following list of...
