Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Book Image

Machine Learning Algorithms

Overview of this book

In this book, you will learn all the important machine learning algorithms that are commonly used in the field of data science. These algorithms can be used for supervised as well as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and semi-supervised learning. The algorithms that are covered in this book are linear regression, logistic regression, SVM, naïve Bayes, k-means, random forest, TensorFlow and feature engineering. In this book, you will how to use these algorithms to resolve your problems, and how they work. This book will also introduce you to natural language processing and recommendation systems, which help you to run multiple algorithms simultaneously. On completion of the book, you will know how to pick the right machine learning algorithm for clustering, classification, or regression for your problem
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 9. Clustering Fundamentals

In this chapter, we're going to introduce the basic concepts of clustering and the structure of k-means, a quite common algorithm that can solve many problems efficiently. However, its assumptions are very strong, in particular those concerning the convexity of the clusters, and this can lead to some limitations in its adoption. We're going to discuss its mathematical foundation and how it can be optimized. Moreover, we're going to analyze two alternatives that can be employed when k-means fails to cluster a dataset. These alternatives are DBSCAN, (which works by considering the differences of sample density), and spectral clustering, a very powerful approach based on the affinity among points.