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)

Vector Quantization

Vector Quantization (VQ) is a method that exploits unsupervised learning in order to perform a lossy compression of a sample xi ∈ ℜN (for simplicity, we are supposing the multi-dimensional samples are flattened) or an entire dataset X. The main idea is to find a codebook Q with a number of entries C << N and associate each element with an entry qi ∈ Q. In the case of a single sample, each entry will represent one or more groups of features (for example, it can be the mean), therefore, the process can be described as a transformation T whose general representation is:

The codebook is defined as Q = (q1, q2, ..., qC). Hence, given a synthetic dataset made up of a group of feature aggregates (for example, a group of two consecutive elements), VQ associates a single codebook entry:

As the input sample is represented using a combination...