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

Introduction


In this chapter, we are going to change direction entirely. The previous chapter, which explored topic models, focused on natural language processing, text data, and applying relatively recently developed algorithms. Most data science practitioners would agree that natural language processing, including topic models, is toward the cutting edge of data science and is an active research area. We now understand that topic models can, and should, be leveraged wherever text data could potentially drive insights or growth, including in social media analysis, recommendation engines, and news filtering.

This chapter takes us into the retail space to explore a foundational and reliable algorithm for analyzing transaction data. While this algorithm might not be on the cutting edge or in the catalog of the most popular machine learning algorithms, it is ubiquitous and undeniably impactful in the retail space. The insights it drives are easily interpretable, immediately actionable, and instructive...