Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Third Edition

By : Alberto Boschetti, Luca Massaron
Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Third Edition

By: Alberto Boschetti, Luca Massaron

Overview of this book

Fully expanded and upgraded, the latest edition of Python Data Science Essentials will help you succeed in data science operations using the most common Python libraries. This book offers up-to-date insight into the core of Python, including the latest versions of the Jupyter Notebook, NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn. The book covers detailed examples and large hybrid datasets to help you grasp essential statistical techniques for data collection, data munging and analysis, visualization, and reporting activities. You will also gain an understanding of advanced data science topics such as machine learning algorithms, distributed computing, tuning predictive models, and natural language processing. Furthermore, You’ll also be introduced to deep learning and gradient boosting solutions such as XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. By the end of the book, you will have gained a complete overview of the principal machine learning algorithms, graph analysis techniques, and all the visualization and deployment instruments that make it easier to present your results to an audience of both data science experts and business users
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

An overview of unsupervised learning

In all the methods we've seen so far, every sample or observation has its own target label or value. In some other cases, the dataset is unlabeled and, to extract the structure of the data, you need an unsupervised approach. In this section, we're going to introduce two methods to perform clustering, as they are among the most used methods for unsupervised learning.

It is useful to bear in mind that often the terms clustering and unsupervised learning are considered synonymous, though, actually, unsupervised learning has a larger meaning.

K-means

The first method that we'll introduce is named K-means, the most commonly used clustering algorithm despite its inevitable shortcomings...