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

Characteristics of Transaction Data

The data used in market basket analysis is transaction data or any type of data that resembles transaction data. In its most basic form, transaction data has some sort of transaction identifier, such as an invoice or transaction number, and a list of products associated with said identifier. It just so happens that these two base elements are all that is needed to perform market basket analysis. However, transaction data rarely – it is probably even safe to say never – comes in this basic form. Transaction data typically includes pricing information, dates and times, and customer identifiers, among many other things. Here is how each product is mapped to multiple invoices:

Figure 8.10: Each available product is going to map back to multiple invoice numbers

Due to the complexity of transaction data, data cleaning is crucial. The goal of data cleaning in the context of market basket analysis is to filter out all...