Chapter 6: Prediction

Being able to predict the future using data is becoming increasingly possible. Not only that; soon, being able to perform successful predictive modeling will not be a competitive advantage anymore—it will be a necessity to survive. To improve the effectiveness of predictive modeling, many focus on the algorithms that are used for prediction; however, there are many meaningful steps you can take to improve the success of prediction by performing more effective data preprocessing. That is the end goal in this book: learning how to preprocess data more effectively. However, in this chapter, we are going to take a very important step toward that goal. In this chapter, we are going to learn the fundamentals of predictive modeling. When we learn the concepts and the techniques of data preprocessing, we will rely on these fundamentals to make better data preprocessing decisions.

While many different algorithms can be applied for predictive modeling, the fundamental...