Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By : Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger
Book Image

Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

By: Benjamin Johnston, Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger

Overview of this book

Unsupervised learning is a useful and practical solution in situations where labeled data is not available. Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python guides you in learning the best practices for using unsupervised learning techniques in tandem with Python libraries and extracting meaningful information from unstructured data. The book begins by explaining how basic clustering works to find similar data points in a set. Once you are well-versed with the k-means algorithm and how it operates, you’ll learn what dimensionality reduction is and where to apply it. As you progress, you’ll learn various neural network techniques and how they can improve your model. While studying the applications of unsupervised learning, you will also understand how to mine topics that are trending on Twitter and Facebook and build a news recommendation engine for users. Finally, you will be able to put your knowledge to work through interesting activities such as performing a Market Basket Analysis and identifying relationships between different products. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to confidently build your own models using Python.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python
Preface

Market Basket Analysis


Imagine you work for a retailer that sells dozens of products and your boss comes to you and asks the following questions:

  • What products are purchased together most frequently?

  • How should the products be organized and positioned in the store?

  • How do we identify the best products to discount via coupons?

You might reasonably respond with complete bewilderment, as those questions are very diverse and do not immediately seem answerable using a single algorithm and dataset. However, the answer to all those questions and many more is market basket analysis. The general idea behind market basket analysis is to identify and quantify which items, or groups of items, are purchased together frequently enough to drive insight into customer behavior and product relationships.

Before we dive into the analytics, it is worth defining the term market basket. A market basket is a permanent set of products in an economic system. In this case, permanent does not necessarily mean permanent...