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


Market basket analysis is used to analyze and extract insights from transaction or transaction-like data that can be used to help drive growth in many industries, most famously the retail industry. These decisions can include how to layout the retail space, what products to discount, and how to price products. One of the central pillars of market basket analysis is the establishment of association rules. Association rule learning is a machine learning approach to uncovering the associations between the products individuals purchase that are strong enough to be leveraged in business decisions. Association rule learning relies on the Apriori algorithm to find frequent item sets in a computationally efficient way. These models are atypical of machine learning models because no prediction is being done, the results cannot really be evaluated using any one metric, and the parameter values are selected not by grid search, but by domain requirements specific to the question of interest...