Using nnet for prediction, am i doing it right?

Question

I\'m still pretty new to R and AI / ML techniques. I would like to use a neural net for prediction, and since I\'m new I would just like to see if this is how it should be done.

Answer 1

I really like the caret package, as it provides a nice, unified interface to a variety of models, such as nnet. Furthermore, it automatically tunes hyperparameters (such as size and decay) using cross-validation or bootstrap re-sampling. The downside is that all this re-sampling takes some time.

#Load Packages
require(quantmod) #for Lag()
require(nnet)
require(caret)

#Make toy dataset
y <- sin(seq(0, 20, 0.1))
te <- data.frame(y, x1=Lag(y), x2=Lag(y,2))
names(te) <- c("y", "x1", "x2")

#Fit model
model <- train(y ~ x1 + x2, te, method='nnet', linout=TRUE, trace = FALSE,
                #Grid of tuning parameters to try:
                tuneGrid=expand.grid(.size=c(1,5,10),.decay=c(0,0.001,0.1))) 
ps <- predict(model, te)

#Examine results
model
plot(y)
lines(ps, col=2)

It also predicts on the proper scale, so you can directly compare results. If you are interested in neural networks, you should also take a look at the neuralnet and RSNNS packages. caret can currently tune nnet and neuralnet models, but does not yet have an interface for RSNNS.

/edit: caret now has an interface for RSNNS. It turns out if you email the package maintainer and ask that a model be added to caret he'll usually do it!

/edit: caret also now supports Bayesian regularization for feed-forward neural networks from the brnn package. Furthermore, caret now also makes it much easier to specify your own custom models, to interface with any neural network package you like!