How can you learn Predictive Modelling?


Let us start with the introduction of predictive analytics. Before Knowing what it is and how it suits us, it is worthless to learn that skill.


What is Predictive Analytics?


According to SAS ,"Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine-learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data."
Other definitions are just one click away from you .Just google it.  that is why google has become a verb from a noun :)

Why Predictive Analytics?


As stated earlier, this is one of the most important question to be answered first. (the only exception is that if you have passion to learn new things in life, you can skip this and start learning)
Predictive Analytics is a part of Data Science(It's a subset of Data Science) and we all know that Data Science is the sexiest job of 21st century. you can refer that Oct 2012 HBR article here.

A lot of other sources such as  Forbes, Inc, Adobe have also highlighted the importance of predictive analytics. you can refer their articles by clicking on previous hyperlinks.


Few Myths


1. Predictive Analytics is Big Data Analytics
Not necessary, you can also apply these techniques with small data sets. If you are a beginner, you can start with UCI Machine repository data or  you can make use of Built-in data files of R. Few other sources have been written here.

2. We should have the knowledge of algorithms beforehand (we should have studied them earlier)
No need, algorithms such decision tree, KNN, RandomForest, Logistic Regression  as are simple to understand. Even if you have not studied algorithms earlier , you can easily grasps the concepts. Even in the computer science majors this paper of data mining is not taught at some universities and they learn it


Resources for learning Predictive Analytics

One of the interesting thing to read blogs to develop interest. Hence, just follow few beautiful blogs.Some of the beautiful blogs are as below:
http://www.r-bloggers.com/
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/
http://www.kdnuggets.com/
http://blog.kaggle.com/

Few Beautiful books:
Introduction to statistical learning by Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani
Applied Predictive Modelling by Max Kuhn

You can also make use of MOOCs.
I found lectures by Nando de Freitas, professor at UBC to be most interesting.
You can also refer MIT OCW course no 6.034(Artificial Intelligence)

My personal advice: Please do not indulge in a lot of material. With the power of internet, you can find plenty of blogs for this field, plenty of video lectures  and plenty of books, but it will be better if you stick to few resources, as this will help you in referring them in case of doubt.

How to excel in this Field?
Excelling this field is quite similar to other fields. Just Practice as much as you can!


(I hope you would have enjoyed reading this article)

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