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

In the preceding chapter, we explored market basket analysis. Market basket analysis, as you hopefully recall, is an algorithm that seeks to understand the relationships between all the items and groups of items in transaction data. These relationships are then leveraged to help retailers optimize store layouts, more accurately order inventory, and adjust prices without shrinking the number of items in each transaction. We now change directions to explore hotspot modeling.

Let's consider an imaginary scenario: a new disease has begun spreading through numerous communities in the country that you live in and the government is trying to figure out how to confront this health emergency. Critical to any plan to confront this health emergency is epidemiological knowledge, including where the patients are located and how the disease is moving. The ability to locate and quantify problem areas (which are classically referred to as hotspots) can help health professionals...