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

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Unlike LDA, Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is not a probabilistic model. instead, it is, as the name implies, an approach involving linear algebra. Using matrix factorization as an approach to topic modeling was introduced by Daniel D. Lee and H. Sebastian Seung in 1999. The approach falls into the decomposition family of models that includes PCA, the modeling technique introduced in Chapter 4, Introduction to Dimensionality Reduction and PCA.

The major differences between PCA and NMF are that PCA requires components to be perpendicular while allowing them to be either positive or negative. NMF requires that matrix components be non-negative, which should make sense if you think of this requirement in the context of the data. Topics cannot be negatively related to documents, and words cannot be negatively related to topics.

If you are not convinced, try to interpret a negative weight associating a topic with a document. It would be...