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

Hotspot Analysis

To start, hotspots are areas of higher concentrations of data points, such as particular neighborhoods where the crime rate is abnormally high or swaths of the country that are impacted by an above-average number of tornadoes. Hotspot analysis is the process of finding these hotspots, should any exist, in a population using sampled data. This process is generally done by leveraging kernel density estimation.

Hotspot analysis can be described in four high-level steps:

  1. Collect the data: The data should include the locations of the objects or events. As we have briefly mentioned, the amount of data needed to run and achieve actionable results is relatively flexible. The optimal state is to have a sample dataset that is representative of the population.
  2. Identify the base map: The next step is to identify which base map would best suit the analytical and presentational needs of the project. On this base map, the results of the model will be overlaid, so...