Unsupervised Learning in Python

Learn how to discover the underlying groups (or "clusters") in a dataset. By the end of this chapter, you'll be clustering companies using their stock market prices, and distinguishing different species by clustering their measurements.

In this chapter, you'll learn about two unsupervised learning techniques for data visualization, hierarchical clustering and t-SNE. Hierarchical clustering merges the data samples into ever-coarser clusters, yielding a tree visualization of the resulting cluster hierarchy. t-SNE maps the data samples into 2d space so that the proximity of the samples to one another can be visualized.

Dimension reduction summarizes a dataset using its common occuring patterns. In this chapter, you'll learn about the most fundamental of dimension reduction techniques, "Principal Component Analysis" ("PCA"). PCA is often used before supervised learning to improve model performance and generalization. It can also be useful for unsupervised learning. For example, you'll employ a variant of PCA will allow you to cluster Wikipedia articles by their content!

In this chapter, you'll learn about a dimension reduction technique called "Non-negative matrix factorization" ("NMF") that expresses samples as combinations of interpretable parts. For example, it expresses documents as combinations of topics, and images in terms of commonly occurring visual patterns. You'll also learn to use NMF to build recommender systems that can find you similar articles to read, or musical artists that match your listening history!