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


Topic modeling is one facet of natural language processing (NLP), the field of computer science exploring the relationship between computers and human language, which has been increasing in popularity with the increased availability of textual datasets. NLP can deal with language in almost any form, including text, speech, and images. Besides topic modeling, sentiment analysis, object character recognition, and lexical semantics are noteworthy NLP algorithms. Nowadays, the data being collected and needing analysis less frequently comes in standard tabular forms and more frequently coming in less structured forms, including documents, images, and audio files. As such, successful data science practitioners need to be fluent in methodologies used for handling these diverse datasets.

Here is a demonstration of identifying words in a text and assigning them to topics:

Figure 7.1: Example of identifying words in a text and assigning them to topics

Your immediate question is probably...