R: Unleash Machine Learning Techniques

Data understanding and preparation

To start, we will load these three packages. The data is in the MASS package, but this is a required dependent package loaded with neuralnet:

> library(caret)

> library(neuralnet)
Loading required package: grid
Loading required package: MASS

> library(vcd)

The neuralnet package will be used for the building of the model and caret for the data preparation. The vcd package will assist us in data visualization. Let's load the data and examine its structure:

> data(shuttle)

> str(shuttle)
'data.frame':256 obs. of  7 variables:
 $ stability: Factor w/ 2 levepicels "stab","xstab": 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
 $ error    : Factor w/ 4 levels "LX","MM","SS",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
 $ sign : Factor w/ 2 levels "nn","pp": ...