Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
NEURAL NETWORKS
CONTEXT AND PERSPECTIVE
Juan is a statistical performance analyst for a major professional athletic team. His team has been
steadily improving over recent seasons, and heading into the coming season management believes
that by adding between two and four excellent players, the team will have an outstanding shot at
achieving the league championship. They have tasked Juan with identifying their best options
from among a list of 59 experienced players that will be available to them. All of these players
have experience, some have played professionally before and some have many years of experience
as amateurs. None are to be ruled out without being assessed for their potential ability to add star
power and productivity to the existing team. The executives Juan works for are anxious to get
going on contacting the most promising prospects, so Juan needs to quickly evaluate these athletes'
past performance and make recommendations based on his analysis.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After completing the reading and exercises in this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain what a neural network is, how it is used and the benefits of using it.
Recognize the necessary format for data in order to perform neural network data mining.
Develop a neural network data mining model in RapidMiner using a training data set.
Interpret the model's outputs and apply them to a scoring data set in order to deploy the
model.
ORGANIZATIONAL UNDERSTANDING
Juan faces high expectations and has a delivery deadline to meet. He is a professional, he knows
his business and knows how important the intangibles are in assessing athletic talent. He lso
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