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

t-Distributed SNE


t-SNE aims to address the crowding problem using a modified version of the KL divergence cost function and by substituting the Gaussian distribution with the Student's t-distribution in the low-dimensional space. Student's t-distribution is a continuous distribution that is used when one has a small sample size and unknown population standard deviation. It is often used in the Student's t-test.

The modified KL cost function considers the pairwise distances in the low-dimensional space equally, while the student's distribution employs a heavy tail in the low-dimensional space to avoid the crowding problem. In the higher-dimensional probability calculation, the Gaussian distribution is still used to ensure that a moderate distance in the higher dimensions is still represented as such in the lower dimensions. This combination of different distributions in the respective spaces allows the faithful representation of datapoints separated by small and moderate distances.

Note

For...