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

Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks

Given that autoencoders are based on artificial neural networks, an understanding of neural networks is also critical for understanding autoencoders. This section of the chapter will briefly review the fundamentals of artificial neural networks. It is important to note that there are many aspects of neural networks that are outside the scope of this book. The topic of neural networks could easily fill, and has filled, many books on its own, and this section is not to be considered an exhaustive discussion of the topic.

As described earlier, artificial neural networks are primarily used in supervised learning problems, where we have a set of input information, say a series of images, and we are training an algorithm to map the information to a desired output, such as a class or category. Consider the CIFAR-10 dataset shown in Figure 5.3 as an example, which contains images of 10 different categories (airplane, automobile, bird, cat, deer...