Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with R

By : Alok Malik, Bradford Tuckfield
Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with R

By: Alok Malik, Bradford Tuckfield

Overview of this book

Starting with the basics, Applied Unsupervised Learning with R explains clustering methods, distribution analysis, data encoders, and features of R that enable you to understand your data better and get answers to your most pressing business questions. This book begins with the most important and commonly used method for unsupervised learning - clustering - and explains the three main clustering algorithms - k-means, divisive, and agglomerative. Following this, you'll study market basket analysis, kernel density estimation, principal component analysis, and anomaly detection. You'll be introduced to these methods using code written in R, with further instructions on how to work with, edit, and improve R code. To help you gain a practical understanding, the book also features useful tips on applying these methods to real business problems, including market segmentation and fraud detection. By working through interesting activities, you'll explore data encoders and latent variable models. By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of different anomaly detection methods, such as outlier detection, Mahalanobis distances, and contextual and collective anomaly detection.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Summary


Congratulations! You have completed the first chapter of this book. If you've understood everything we've studied until now, you now know more about unsupervised learning than most people who claim to know data science. The k-means clustering algorithm is so fundamental to unsupervised learning that many people equate k-means clustering with unsupervised learning.

In this chapter, you not only learned about k-means clustering and its uses, but also k-medoids clustering, along with various clustering metrics and their uses. So, now you have a top-tier understanding of k-means and k-medoid clustering algorithms.

In the next chapter, we're going to have a look at some of the lesser-known clustering algorithms and their uses.