R: Predictive Analysis

Predicting class membership on synthetic 2D data

Our first example showcasing tree-based methods in R will operate on a synthetic data set that we have created. The data set can be generated using commands in the companion R file for this chapter, available from the publisher. The data consists of 287 observations of two input features, x1 and x2.

The output variable is a categorical variable with three possible classes: a, b, and c. If we follow the commands in the code file, we will end up with a data frame in R, mcdf:

> head(mcdf, n = 5)
          x1       x2 class
1 18.58213 12.03106     a
2 22.09922 12.36358     a
3 11.78412 12.75122     a
4 23.41888 13.89088     a
5 16.37667 10.32308     a

This problem is actually very simple because on the one hand, we have a very small data ...