We've used the R programming language pretty much throughout this book since it is used by most data scientists and is very easy for people just getting started in statistics to comprehend. In this chapter, we'll again use R, this time to suggest how machine learning techniques might be applicable to a data or database developer.
We'll use a post offered by Will Stanton, a data scientist, to get us started. In his post, he offers a clever example of creating a simple classification model in R, using the caret package.
The R caret package Will uses in his example is very easy to use, containing wrapper functions that allow you to use the exact same functions for training and predicting with dozens of different algorithms. On top of that, it includes sophisticated, built-in methods for evaluating the effectiveness...