Book Image

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning with Python

By : Giuseppe Bonaccorso
Book Image

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning with Python

By: Giuseppe Bonaccorso

Overview of this book

Unsupervised learning is about making use of raw, untagged data and applying learning algorithms to it to help a machine predict its outcome. With this book, you will explore the concept of unsupervised learning to cluster large sets of data and analyze them repeatedly until the desired outcome is found using Python. This book starts with the key differences between supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning. You will be introduced to the best-used libraries and frameworks from the Python ecosystem and address unsupervised learning in both the machine learning and deep learning domains. You will explore various algorithms, techniques that are used to implement unsupervised learning in real-world use cases. You will learn a variety of unsupervised learning approaches, including randomized optimization, clustering, feature selection and transformation, and information theory. You will get hands-on experience with how neural networks can be employed in unsupervised scenarios. You will also explore the steps involved in building and training a GAN in order to process images. By the end of this book, you will have learned the art of unsupervised learning for different real-world challenges.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Agglomerative clustering on the Water Treatment Plant dataset

Let's now consider a more detailed problem on a larger dataset (the instructions to download it are provided in the Technical requirements section at the beginning of the chapter) containing 527 samples with 38 chemical and physical variables describing the status of water treatment plants. As the same authors (Bejar, Cortes, and Poch) stated, the domain is poorly-structured and careful analysis is needed. At the same time, our goal is to find the optimal clustering with an agnostic approach; in other words, we won't consider the semantic labeling process (which needs a domain expert) but only the geometrical structure of the dataset and the relations discovered by the agglomerative algorithm.

Once downloaded, the CSV file (called water-treatment.data) can be loaded using pandas (of course, the term <DATA_PATH...