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

Introduction

We'll continue our discussion of dimensionality reduction techniques as we turn our attention to autoencoders. Autoencoders are a particularly interesting area of focus as they provide a means of using supervised learning based on artificial neural networks but in an unsupervised context. Being based on artificial neural networks, autoencoders are an extremely effective means of performing dimensionality reduction, but also provide additional benefits. With recent increases in the availability of data, processing power, and network connectivity, autoencoders are experiencing a resurgence in usage and the study of them, the likes of which have not been seen since their origins in the late 1980s. This is also consistent with the study of artificial neural networks, which were first described and implemented as a concept in the 1960s. Presently, you would only need to conduct a cursory internet search to discover the popularity and power of neural networks.

Autoencoders...