Book Image

Data Science for Marketing Analytics

By : Tommy Blanchard, Debasish Behera, Pranshu Bhatnagar
Book Image

Data Science for Marketing Analytics

By: Tommy Blanchard, Debasish Behera, Pranshu Bhatnagar

Overview of this book

Data Science for Marketing Analytics covers every stage of data analytics, from working with a raw dataset to segmenting a population and modeling different parts of the population based on the segments. The book starts by teaching you how to use Python libraries, such as pandas and Matplotlib, to read data from Python, manipulate it, and create plots, using both categorical and continuous variables. Then, you'll learn how to segment a population into groups and use different clustering techniques to evaluate customer segmentation. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll explore ways to evaluate and select the best segmentation approach, and go on to create a linear regression model on customer value data to predict lifetime value. In the concluding chapters, you'll gain an understanding of regression techniques and tools for evaluating regression models, and explore ways to predict customer choice using classification algorithms. Finally, you'll apply these techniques to create a churn model for modeling customer product choices. By the end of this book, you will be able to build your own marketing reporting and interactive dashboard solutions.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Data Science for Marketing Analytics
Preface

k-means Clustering


k-means clustering is a very common unsupervised learning technique with a very wide range of applications. It is powerful because it is conceptually relatively simple, scales to very large datasets, and tends to work quite well in practice. In the following section, you will learn the conceptual foundations of k-means clustering, how to apply k-means clustering to data, and how to deal with high-dimensional data (that is, data with many different variables) in the context of clustering.

Understanding k-means Clustering

k-means clustering is an algorithm that tries to find the best way of grouping data points into k different groups, where k is a parameter given to the algorithm. For now, we will choose k arbitrarily. We will revisit how to choose k in practice in the next chapter. The algorithm then works iteratively to try to find the best grouping. There are two steps to this algorithm:

  1. The algorithm begins by randomly selecting k points in space to be the centroids of...