In the previous chapter, we have learned how to find classes or categories of individual data points. With a handful of training data items that were paired with their respective classes, we learned a model that we can now use to classify future data items. We called this supervised learning, as the learning was guided by a teacher; in our case the teacher had the form of correct classifications.
Let us now imagine that we do not possess those labels by which we could learn the classification model. This could be, for example, because they were too expensive to collect. What could we have done in that case?
Well, of course, we would not be able to learn a classification model. Still, we could find some pattern within the data itself. This is what we will do in this chapter, where we consider the challenge of a "question and answer" website. When a user browses our site looking for some particular information, the search engine will most likely...