Machine learning with R
Many of the algorithms needed for machine learning are not included as part of the base R installation. Instead, the algorithms are available via a large community of experts who have shared their work freely. These must be installed on top of base R manually. Thanks to R’s status as free open-source software, there is no additional charge for this functionality.
A collection of R functions that can be shared among users is called a package. Free packages exist for each of the machine learning algorithms covered in this book. In fact, this book only covers a small portion of all of R’s machine learning packages.
If you are interested in the breadth of R packages, you can view a list at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), a collection of web and FTP sites located around the world to provide the most up-to-date versions of R software and packages. If you obtained the R software via download, it was most likely from CRAN. The CRAN...