Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By : Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger
Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By: Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger

Overview of this book

Unsupervised learning is a useful and practical solution in situations where labeled data is not available. Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python guides you in learning the best practices for using unsupervised learning techniques in tandem with Python libraries and extracting meaningful information from unstructured data. The book begins by explaining how basic clustering works to find similar data points in a set. Once you are well-versed with the k-means algorithm and how it operates, you’ll learn what dimensionality reduction is and where to apply it. As you progress, you’ll learn various neural network techniques and how they can improve your model. While studying the applications of unsupervised learning, you will also understand how to mine topics that are trending on Twitter and Facebook and build a news recommendation engine for users. Finally, you will be able to put your knowledge to work through interesting activities such as performing a Market Basket Analysis and identifying relationships between different products. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to confidently build your own models using Python.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we have explored what clustering is and why it is important in a variety of data challenges. Building upon this foundation of clustering knowledge, you implemented k-means, which is one of the simplest yet most popular methods of unsupervised learning. If you have reached this summary and can repeat what k-means does step-by-step to your fellow classmate, good job! If not, please go back and review the previous material – the content only grows in complexity from here. From here, we will be moving on to hierarchical clustering, which, in one configuration, reuses the centroid learning approach that we used in k-means. We will build upon this approach by outlining additional clustering methodologies and approaches in the next chapter.