Boook club “Hands-On Machine Learning with R” - Chp11 Random Forests

Join us for our new online boookclub session discussing ‘Hands-On Machine Learning with R’ by Bradley Boehmke and Brandon Greenwell! On Monday December 5, we will talk about Chapter 11 - Random Forests.

We learned about decision trees in the previous session. But why settle for one decision tree when you can have a whole forest of them? :D Random forests are a modification of bagging. They have more predictive power than single decision trees and suffer less from tree correlation than bagging.

Our presenter is Oussama Zidi, a biostatistician and project manager at Urgo corporation (a wound healing specialist). He primarily uses SAS and R for stats and machine learning; and python for building apps. He has a graduate degree in applied mathematics from the University of Burgundy, France.

This boook club:
For this boook club we - the Den Bosch and Utrecht chapters of R Ladies - are joining forces. We will alternate hosting the meetups. In +- 10 meetings (probably more :) ) , we will work through all the chapters in the book together. We are doing this boookclub, because we like to learn together. It is not the case presenters are the experts on the matter. To make this a group effort, the idea is that all participants take turns in presenting chapters, as for example Marianna presented chapter 6, and Elena chapter 7 and 8! We are of course available to help. If you’re not comfortable presenting, just listening is also okay.
If you cannot make it this time, feel free to join in on one of the subsequent meetings.

For who:

• People who want to take their first steps into machine learning
• Some prior knowledge on R programming will be helpful. As the authors of the book themselves mention: “This book is not meant to be an introduction to R or to programming in general; as we assume the reader has familiarity with the R language to include defining functions, managing R objects, controlling the flow of a program, and other basic tasks.”

What to expect:

• Presentations summarising the key points on each topic of the book
• Putting the theory to practice by going through exercises together
• Room to discuss questions and other thoughts

Whereabouts:

• Meet every 2 weeks via Zoom. The password will be sent to you via e-mail before the meeting.
• We meet every second Monday, from 7 - 8.30 pm
• It is not necessary to read the chapters in advance, but feel free to do so.

R-Ladies is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. See the code of conduct.
The book can be found at https://bradleyboehmke.github.io/HOML/. It is also available in print. For the slides of our previous meetings, see https://github.com/rladiesnl/book_club_handsonML.