Book Image

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning with Python

By : Giuseppe Bonaccorso
Book Image

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning with Python

By: Giuseppe Bonaccorso

Overview of this book

Unsupervised learning is about making use of raw, untagged data and applying learning algorithms to it to help a machine predict its outcome. With this book, you will explore the concept of unsupervised learning to cluster large sets of data and analyze them repeatedly until the desired outcome is found using Python. This book starts with the key differences between supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning. You will be introduced to the best-used libraries and frameworks from the Python ecosystem and address unsupervised learning in both the machine learning and deep learning domains. You will explore various algorithms, techniques that are used to implement unsupervised learning in real-world use cases. You will learn a variety of unsupervised learning approaches, including randomized optimization, clustering, feature selection and transformation, and information theory. You will get hands-on experience with how neural networks can be employed in unsupervised scenarios. You will also explore the steps involved in building and training a GAN in order to process images. By the end of this book, you will have learned the art of unsupervised learning for different real-world challenges.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction to clustering

As we explained in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Unsupervised Learning, the main goal of a cluster analysis is to group the elements of a dataset according to a similarity measure or a proximity criterion. In the first part of this chapter, we are going to focus on the former approach, while in the second part and in the next chapter, we will analyze more generic methods that exploit other geometric features of the dataset.

Let's take a data generating process pdata(x) and draw N samples from it:

It's possible to assume that the probability space of pdata(x) is partitionable into (potentially infinite) configurations containing K (for K=1,2, ...) regions so that pdata(x; k) represents the probability of a sample belonging to a cluster k. In this way, we are stating that every possible clustering structure is already existing when pdata(x...