Mastering Machine Learning with R - Second Edition

Business understanding

Our first case focuses on the goal of predicting the water yield (in inches) of the Snake River Watershed in Wyoming, USA, as a function of the water content of the year's snowfall. This forecast will be useful in managing the water flow and reservoir levels as the Snake River provides much-needed irrigation water for the farms and ranches of several western states. The snake dataset is available in the alr3 package (note that alr stands for applied linear regression):

    > install.packages("alr3")    > library(alr3)    > data(snake)    > dim(snake)    [1] 17  2    > head(snake)         X    Y    1 23.1 10.5    2 32.8 16.7    3 31.8 18.2    4 32.0 17.0    5 30.4 16.3    6 24.0 10.5

Now that we have 17 observations, data exploration can begin. But first, let's ...