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.

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Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Applied Unsupervised Learning with R
Applied Unsupervised Learning with R
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Clustering Methods
Introduction to Clustering Methods
Introduction
Introduction to Clustering
Introduction to the Iris Dataset
Introduction to k-means Clustering
Introduction to k-means Clustering with Built-In Functions
Introduction to Market Segmentation
Introduction to k-medoids Clustering
Summary
2
Advanced Clustering Methods
Advanced Clustering Methods
Introduction
Introduction to k-modes Clustering
Introduction to Density-Based Clustering (DBSCAN)
Summary
3
Probability Distributions
Probability Distributions
Introduction
Basic Terminology of Probability Distributions
Introduction to Kernel Density Estimation
Introduction to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test
Summary
4
Dimension Reduction
Dimension Reduction
Introduction
Market Basket Analysis
Summary
5
Data Comparison Methods
Data Comparison Methods
Introduction
Analytic Signatures
Comparison of Signatures
Latent Variable Models – Factor Analysis
Summary
6
Anomaly Detection
Anomaly Detection
Introduction
Univariate Outlier Detection
Kernel Density
Summary
Appendix
Appendix
Chapter 1: Introduction to Clustering Methods
Chapter 2: Advanced Clustering Methods
Chapter 3: Probability Distributions
Chapter 4: Dimension Reduction
Chapter 5: Data Comparison Methods
Chapter 6: Anomaly Detection

Univariate Outlier Detection

Anomaly detection is simplest in the univariate case, that is, when each observation is only one number. In this case, we might start by doing a common-sense check for anomalies by checking whether observations are missing, NULL, NA, or recorded as infinity or something that doesn't match the type of the rest of the observations. After performing this check, we can apply true unsupervised learning.

For univariate data, anomaly detection consists of looking for outliers. R's built-in boxplot function makes an initial exploratory check for outliers quite easy, as can be seen in the following exercise.

Exercise 37: Performing an Exploratory Visual Check for Outliers Using R's boxplot Function

For univariate data, anomaly detection consists of looking for outliers. R's built-in boxplot function makes an initial exploratory check for outliers quite easy, as demonstrated in this exercise. We will use a dataset called mtcars, which is built into R.

In this exercise, we...

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