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)

Connectivity constraints

An important feature of agglomerative hierarchical clustering is the possibility to include connectivity constraints to force the merging of specific samples. This kind of prior knowledge is very common in contexts where there are strong relationships between neighbors or when we know that some samples must belong to the same cluster because of their intrinsic properties. To achieve this goal, we need to use a connectivity matrix, A ∈ {0, 1}n × n:

In general, A is the adjacency matrix induced by a graph of the dataset; however, the only important requirement is the absence of isolated samples (without connections), because they cannot be merged in any way. The connectivity matrix is applied during the initial merging stages and forces the algorithm to aggregate the specified samples. As the following agglomerations don't impact on connectivity...