Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By : Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger
Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By: Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger

Overview of this book

Unsupervised learning is a useful and practical solution in situations where labeled data is not available. Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python guides you in learning the best practices for using unsupervised learning techniques in tandem with Python libraries and extracting meaningful information from unstructured data. The book begins by explaining how basic clustering works to find similar data points in a set. Once you are well-versed with the k-means algorithm and how it operates, you’ll learn what dimensionality reduction is and where to apply it. As you progress, you’ll learn various neural network techniques and how they can improve your model. While studying the applications of unsupervised learning, you will also understand how to mine topics that are trending on Twitter and Facebook and build a news recommendation engine for users. Finally, you will be able to put your knowledge to work through interesting activities such as performing a Market Basket Analysis and identifying relationships between different products. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to confidently build your own models using Python.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python
Preface

Introduction to DBSCAN


As mentioned in the previous section, the strength of DBSCAN becomes apparent when we analyze the benefits of taking a density-based approach to clustering. DBSCAN evaluates density as a combination of neighborhood radius and minimum points found in a neighborhood deemed a cluster.

This concept can be driven home if we re-consider the scenario where you are tasked with organizing an unlabeled shipment of wine for your store. In the past example, it was made clear that we can find similar wines based off their features, such as scientific chemical traits. Knowing this information, we can more easily group together similar wines and efficiently have our products organized for sale in no time. Hopefully, that is clear by now – but what may not have been clear is the fact that products that you order to stock your store often reflect real-world purchase patterns. To promote variety in your inventory, but still have enough stock of the most popular wines, there is a highly...