Book Image

The Unsupervised Learning Workshop

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

The Unsupervised Learning Workshop

By: Aaron Jones, Christopher Kruger, Benjamin Johnston

Overview of this book

Do you find it difficult to understand how popular companies like WhatsApp and Amazon find valuable insights from large amounts of unorganized data? The Unsupervised Learning Workshop will give you the confidence to deal with cluttered and unlabeled datasets, using unsupervised algorithms in an easy and interactive manner. The book starts by introducing the most popular clustering algorithms of unsupervised learning. You'll find out how hierarchical clustering differs from k-means, along with understanding how to apply DBSCAN to highly complex and noisy data. Moving ahead, you'll use autoencoders for efficient data encoding. As you progress, you’ll use t-SNE models to extract high-dimensional information into a lower dimension for better visualization, in addition to working with topic modeling for implementing natural language processing (NLP). In later chapters, you’ll find key relationships between customers and businesses using Market Basket Analysis, before going on to use Hotspot Analysis for estimating the population density of an area. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to apply unsupervised algorithms on cluttered datasets to find useful patterns and insights.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Preface

Clustering Refresher

Chapter 1, Introduction to Clustering, covered both the high-level concepts and in-depth details of one of the most basic clustering algorithms: k-means. While it is indeed a simple approach, do not discredit it; it will be a valuable addition to your toolkit as you continue your exploration of the unsupervised learning world. In many real-world use cases, companies experience valuable discoveries through the simplest methods, such as k-means or linear regression (for supervised learning). An example of this is evaluating a large selection of customer data – if you were to evaluate it directly in a table, it would be unlikely that you'd find anything helpful. However, even a simple clustering algorithm can identify where groups within the data are similar and dissimilar. As a refresher, let's quickly walk through what clusters are and how k-means works to find them:

Figure 2.1: The attributes that separate supervised and unsupervised...