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You're reading from  Practical Predictive Analytics

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781785886188
Edition1st Edition
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Ralph Winters
Ralph Winters
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Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters

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Supervised versus unsupervised learning models


We have already discussed the concept of target (dependent) variables and independent variables, or features. Features (or independent variables) are used to describe the relationship with, or to predict values of, a target variable. After defining your independent and depending variables, you will formulate your model. One way to characterize the way in which a model learns from the data, is by classifying it into either a supervised or unsupervised learning model.

Supervised learning models

When the possible values of a target variable are specified and labeled, a model is considered supervised, that is, we know what we want to predict, and the goal is to find the most appropriate predictive model which will predict the outcome.

As an example, if we are predicting the approval rating for a product, we know what we are predicting (approval rating of a product), and we also usually know the range of possible outcomes. It could be a percentage from...

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Practical Predictive Analytics
Published in: Jun 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781785886188

Author (1)

author image
Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters