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

Market Basket Analysis

Imagine you work for a retailer that sells dozens of products and your boss comes to you and asks the following questions:

  • What products are purchased together most frequently?
  • How should the products be organized and positioned in the store?
  • How do we identify the best products to discount via coupons?

You might reasonably respond with complete bewilderment, as those questions are very diverse and do not immediately seem answerable using a single algorithm and dataset. However, the answer to all those questions and many more is market basket analysis. The general idea behind market basket analysis is to identify and quantify which items, or groups of items, are purchased together frequently enough to drive insight into customer behavior and product relationships.

Before we dive into the analytics, it is worth defining the term market basket. A market basket is a permanent set of products in an economic system. Permanent does not...