Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

By : Imran Ahmad
5 (2)
Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

5 (2)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works. You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
13
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Understanding clustering algorithms

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques used in unsupervised learning is based on grouping similar patterns together through clustering algorithms. It is used to understand a particular aspect of the data that is related to the problem we are trying to solve. Clustering algorithms look for natural grouping in data items. As the group is not based on any target or assumptions, it is classified as an unsupervised learning technique. 

Groupings created by various clustering algorithms are based on finding the similarities between various data points in the problem space. The best way to determine the similarities between data points will vary from problem to problem and will depend on the nature of the problem we are dealing with. Let's look at the various methods that can be used to calculate the similarities between various...