Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By : Pratap Dangeti
Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By: Pratap Dangeti

Overview of this book

Complex statistics in machine learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong machine learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement. This book will teach you all it takes to perform the complex statistical computations that are required for machine learning. You will gain information on the statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. You will see real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of machine learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will come across programs for performing tasks such as modeling, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, working with vectors, matrices, and more. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the statistics required for machine learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

K-means clustering


Clustering is the task of grouping observations in such a way that members of the same cluster are more similar to each other and members of different clusters are very different from each other.

Clustering is commonly used to explore a dataset to either identify the underlying patterns in it or to create a group of characteristics. In the case of social networks, they can be clustered to identify communities and to suggest missing connections between people. Here are a few examples:

  • In anti-money laundering measures, suspicious activities and individuals can be identified using anomaly detection
  • In biology, clustering is used to find groups of genes with similar expression patterns
  • In marketing analytics, clustering is used to find segments of similar customers so that different marketing strategies can be applied to different customer segments accordingly

The k-means clustering algorithm is an iterative process of moving the centers of clusters or centroids to the mean position...