Advanced Machine Learning with R

Ensembles

The quote at the beginning of this chapter mentions using ensembles to win machine learning competitions. However, they do have practical applications. I've provided a definition of what ensemble modeling is, but why does it work? To demonstrate this, I've co-opted an example from the following blog, which goes into depth at a number of ensemble methods: http://mlwave.com/kaggle-ensembling-guide/.

As I write this chapter, we're only a day away from the 2018 College Football Championship—the Clemson Tigers versus the Alabama Crimson Tide. Let's say we want to review our probability of winning a friendly wager where we want to take the Tide minus the points (5.5 points at the time of writing).

Assume that we've been following three ...