Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By : Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose
Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By: Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose

Overview of this book

Data science is hot. Bloomberg named a data scientist as the ‘hottest job in America’. Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools using which you can produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Each chapter in the book presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. You’ll learn how to prepare data, perform exploratory data analysis, and prepare to model the data. As you progress, you’ll explore what are decision trees and how to use them. You’ll also learn about model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, and neural networks. The later chapters provide comprehensive information about clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. The book also throws light on exciting new topics, such as random forests and general linear models. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to start providing solutions to data science problems using R and Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
17
INDEX
18
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

10.2 INTRODUCTION TO THE k‐MEANS CLUSTERING ALGORITHM

There are many different clustering methods, including hierarchical clustering, Kohonen networks clustering, and BIRCH clustering.1 Here, we shall focus on the k‐means clustering algorithm. The k‐means clustering algorithm2 is a straightforward and effective algorithm for finding clusters in data. The algorithm proceeds as follows:

  • Step 1: Ask the user how many clusters k the data set should be partitioned into.
  • Step 2: Randomly assign k records to be the initial cluster center locations.
  • Step 3: For each record, find the nearest cluster center. Thus, in a sense, each cluster center “owns” a subset of the records, thereby representing a partition of the data set. We therefore have k clusters, C1, C2, …, Ck.
  • Step 4: For each of the k clusters, find the cluster centroid and update the location of each cluster center to the new value of the centroid.
  • Step 5: Repeat steps 3–5 until convergence...