Machine learning: Getting started with random forests in R

According to Gartner, machine learning is on top of the hype cycle at the peak of inflated expectations. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what machine learning actually is and what it can be done with it.

Machine learning is not as abstract as one might think. If you want to get value out of known data and do predictions for unknown data, the most important challenge is asking the right questions and of course knowing what you are doing, especially if you want to optimize your prediction accuracy.

In this blog I'm exploring an example of machine learning. The random forest algorithm. I'll provide an example on how you can use this algorithm to do predictions. In order to implement a random forest, I'm using R with the randomForest library and I'm using the iris dataset which is provided by the R installation.