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

Most data science practitioners would agree that natural language processing, including topic modeling, is toward the cutting edge of data science and is an active research area. We now understand that topic models can, and should, be leveraged wherever text data could potentially drive insights or growth, including in social media analyses, recommendation engines, and news filtering. The preceding chapter featured an exploration of the fundamental features of topic models and two of the major algorithms. In this chapter, we are going to change direction entirely.

This chapter takes us into the retail space to explore a foundational and reliable algorithm for analyzing transaction data. While this algorithm might not be on the cutting edge or in the catalog of the most popular machine learning algorithms, it is ubiquitous and undeniably impactful in the retail space. The insights it drives are easily interpretable, immediately actionable, and instructive for determining...