Chapter 12. Specialized Machine Learning Topics
By now, you are probably eager to start applying machine learning to your own projects—you may have even already done so. If you have attempted a project on your own, you likely found that, the task of turning data into action is more difficult than this book made it appear.
As you attempted to gather data, you might have realized that the information was trapped in a proprietary spreadsheet format or spread across pages on the Web. Making matters worse, after spending hours manually reformatting the data, perhaps your computer slowed to a crawl after running out of memory. Perhaps R even crashed or froze your machine. Hopefully you were undeterred; it does get easier with time.
This chapter covers techniques that may not apply to every machine learning project, but could prove useful for certain types of work. You might find the information particularly useful if you tend to work with data that are:
Stored in unstructured or proprietary formats...
