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Practical Predictive Analytics

You're reading from   Practical Predictive Analytics Analyse current and historical data to predict future trends using R, Spark, and more

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781785886188
Length 576 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Ralph Winters Ralph Winters
Author Profile Icon Ralph Winters
Ralph Winters
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Table of Contents (13) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started with Predictive Analytics FREE CHAPTER 2. The Modeling Process 3. Inputting and Exploring Data 4. Introduction to Regression Algorithms 5. Introduction to Decision Trees, Clustering, and SVM 6. Using Survival Analysis to Predict and Analyze Customer Churn 7. Using Market Basket Analysis as a Recommender Engine 8. Exploring Health Care Enrollment Data as a Time Series 9. Introduction to Spark Using R 10. Exploring Large Datasets Using Spark 11. Spark Machine Learning - Regression and Cluster Models 12. Spark Models – Rule-Based Learning

Decision tree algorithms


Decision trees are considered a good predictive model to start with, and have many advantages. Interpretability, variable selection, variable interaction, and the flexibility to choose the level of complexity for a decision tree all come into play.

Decision trees methods are considered classification methods, so the typical use case for a decision tree is predicting a class or category. However, there are also certain types of decision trees, which are known as regression trees, where the output is a continuous variable. In this way, we can begin development models that are a mix of numeric and categorical variables.

Decision trees are heavily used in marketing and advertising, and in any industry where there is a need to segment customers into different groups. They are also used in healthcare for disease and risk classification.

Advantages of decision trees

Decision trees have many advantages. They can be easily understood by both technical and business people and...

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