Machine Learning for Data Analysis

In this session, you will learn about decision trees, a type of data mining algorithm that can select from among a large number of variables those and their interactions that are most important in predicting the target or response variable to be explained. Decision trees create segmentations or subgroups in the data, by applying a series of simple rules or criteria over and over again.

In this session, you will learn about random forests, a type of data mining algorithm that can select from among a large number of variables those that are most important in determining the target or response variable to be explained. Unlike decision trees, the results of random forests generalize well to new data.

Lasso regression analysis is a shrinkage and variable selection method for linear regression models. The goal of lasso regression is to obtain the subset of predictors that minimizes prediction error for a quantitative response variable.

Cluster analysis is an unsupervised machine learning method that partitions the observations in a data set into a smaller set of clusters where each observation belongs to only one cluster. The goal of cluster analysis is to group, or cluster, observations into subsets based on their similarity of responses on multiple variables.