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

Topic Models

Topic models fall into the unsupervised learning bucket because, almost always, the topics being identified are not known in advance. So, no target exists on which we can perform regression or classification modeling. In terms of unsupervised learning, topic models most resemble clustering algorithms, specifically k-means clustering. You'll recall that, in k-means clustering, the number of clusters is established first, and then the model assigns each data point to one of the predetermined number of clusters. The same is generally true of topic models. We select the number of topics at the start, and then the model isolates the words that form that number of topics. This is a great jumping-off point for a high-level topic modeling overview.

Before that, let's check that the correct environment and libraries are installed and ready for use. The following table lists the required libraries and their main purposes:

Figure 7.2: Table showing...