Eric Mayor - Learning Predictive Analytics with R

Ajay Dhamija is a senior scientist in the Defence Research and Development Organization, Delhi. He has more than 24 years of experience as a researcher and an instructor. He holds an MTech (in computer science and engineering) from IIT Delhi and an MBA (in finance and strategy) from FMS, Delhi. He has to his credit more than 14 research works of international reputation in various fields, including data mining, reverse engineering, analytics, neural network simulation, TRIZ, and so on. He was instrumental in developing a state-of-the-art Computerized Pilot Selection System (CPSS) containing various cognitive and psycho-motor tests. It is used to comprehensively assess the flying aptitude of aspiring pilots of the Indian Air Force. Ajay was honored with an Agni Award for excellence in self reliance in 2005 by the Government of India. He specializes in predictive analytics, information security, big data analytics, machine learning, Bayesian social networks, financial modeling, neuro-fuzzy simulation, and data analysis and data mining using R. He is presently involved in his doctoral work on Financial Modeling of Carbon Finance Data from IIT, Delhi. He has written an international bestseller, Forecasting Exchange Rate: Use of Neural Networks in Quantitative Finance (http://www.amazon.com/Forecasting-Exchange-rate-Networks-Quantitative/dp/3639161807), and is currently authoring another book in R named Multivariate Analysis using R .

Apart from Analytics, Ajay Dhamija is actively involved in information security research. He has been associated with various international and national researchers in the government as well as the corporate sector to pursue his research on ways to amalgamate two important and contemporary fields of data handling, that is, predictive analytics and information security. While he was associated with researchers from the Predictive Analytics and Information Security Institute of India (PRAISIA: www.praisia.com) during his research endeavors, he worked on refining methods of big data analytics for security data analysis (log assessment, incident analysis, threat prediction, and so on) and vulnerability management automation.

You can connect with Ajay at:

I would like to thank my fellow scientists from the Defense Research and Development Organization and researchers from the corporate sector, including Predictive Analytics and Information Security Institute of India (PRAISIA). It is a unique institute of repute and of due to its pioneering work in marrying the two giant and contemporary fields of data handling in modern times, that is, predictive analytics and information security, by adopting bespoke and refined methods of big data analytics. They all contributed in presenting a fruitful review for this book. I'm also thankful to my wife, Seema Dhamija, the managing director at PRAISIA, who has been kind enough to share her research team's time with me in order to have a technical discussion. I'm also thankful to my son, Hemant Dhamija. Many a time, he gave invaluable feedback that I inadvertently neglected during the course of this review. I'm also thankful to a budding security researcher, Shubham Mittal from Makemytrip Inc., for his constant and constructive critiques of my work.

Matt Wiley is a tenured associate professor of mathematics who currently resides in Victoria, Texas. He holds degrees in mathematics (with a computer science minor) from the University of California and a master's degree in business administration from Texas A&M University. He directs the Quality Enhancement Plan at Victoria College and is the managing partner at Elkhart Group Limited, a statistical consultancy. With programming experience in R, C++, Ruby, Fortran, and JavaScript, he has always found ways to meld his passion for writing with his love of logical problem solving and data science. From the boardroom to the classroom, Matt enjoys finding dynamic ways to partner with interdisciplinary and diverse teams to make complex ideas and projects understandable and solvable.

Matt can be found online at www.MattWiley.org.

Khaled Tannir is a visionary solution architect with more than 20 years of technical experience focusing on big data technologies and data mining since 2010.

He is widely recognized as an expert in these fields and has a bachelor's degree in electronics and a master's degree in system information architectures. He completed his education with a master of research degree.

Khaled is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and an avid technologist. He has worked for many companies in France (and recently in Canada), leading the development and implementation of software solutions and giving technical presentations.

He is the author of the books RavenDB 2.x Beginner's Guide and Optimizing Hadoop MapReduce, Packt Publishing , and a technical reviewer on the books Pentaho Analytics for MongoDB and MongoDB High Availability , Packt Publishing .

He enjoys taking landscape and night photos, traveling, playing video games, creating funny electronics gadgets using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and .Net Gadgeteer, and of course spending time with his wife and family.