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

Association Rules

Association rule learning is a machine learning model that seeks to unearth the hidden patterns (in other words, relationships) in transaction data that describe the shopping habits of the customers of any retailer. The definition of an association rule was hinted at when the common probabilistic metrics were defined and explained earlier in the chapter.

Consider the imaginary frequent item set {Milk, Bread}. Two association rules can be formed from that item set: Milk Formula Bread and Bread Formula Milk. For simplicity, the first item set in the association rule is referred to as the antecedent, while the second item set in the association rule is referred to as the consequent. Once the association rules have been identified, all the previously discussed metrics can be computed to evaluate the validity of the association rules, determining whether or not the rules can be leveraged in the decision-making process.

The establishment of an association rule is based on support...