To get the most out of this book

Assuming the reader has a working knowledge of R and of basic statistics, this book will provide the skills and tools required to get the reader up and running with R and ML as quickly and painlessly as possible. There will probably always be detractors who complain that it does not offer enough math or does not do this, or that, or the other thing, but my answer to that is that these books already exist! Why duplicate what has already been done, and very well, for that matter? Again, I have sought to provide something different, something to hold the reader's attention and allow them to succeed in this competitive and rapidly changing field.

The projects covered in this book are intended to expose you to practical knowledge on the implementation of various ML techniques to real-world problems. It is expected that you have a good working knowledge of R and some basic understanding of ML. Basic knowledge of ML and R is a must prior to starting this project.

It should also be noted that the code for the projects is implemented using R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20), nicknamed Eggshell Igloo. The project code has been successfully tested on Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia. There is no reason to believe that the code does not work on other platforms, such as Windows; however, this is not something that has been tested by the author.