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


This chapter continues our discussion of dimensionality reduction techniques as we turn our attention to autoencoders. Autoencoders are a particularly interesting area of focus as they provide a means of using supervised learning based on artificial neural networks, but in an unsupervised context. Being based on artificial neural networks, autoencoders are an extremely effective means of dimensionality reduction, but also provide additional benefits. With recent increases in the availability of data, processing power, and network connectivity, autoencoders are experiencing a resurgence in usage and study from their origins in the late 1980s. This is also consistent with the study of artificial neural networks, which was first described and implemented as a concept in the 1960s. Presently, you would only need to conduct a cursory internet search to discover the popularity and power of neural nets.

Autoencoders can be used for de-noising images and generating artificial data samples...