Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning is a branch of machine learning that deals with unlabeled data. Unlike
supervised learning, where the data is labeled with a specific category or outcome, unsupervised
learning algorithms are tasked with finding patterns and relationships within the data without any
prior knowledge of the data’s meaning. This makes unsupervised learning a powerful tool for
exploratory data analysis, where the goal is to understand the underlying structure of the data.

What is Unsupervised Learning?

In artificial intelligence, machine learning that takes place in the absence of human supervision is
known as unsupervised machine learning. Unsupervised machine learning models, in contrast to
supervised learning, are given unlabeled data and allow discover patterns and insights on their
own—without explicit direction or instruction.

Unsupervised machine learning analyzes and clusters unlabeled datasets using machine learning
algorithms. These algorithms find hidden patterns and data without any human intervention, i.e.,
we don’t give output to our model. The training model has only input parameter values and
discovers the groups or patterns on its own.

Example: Suppose the unsupervised learning algorithm is given an input dataset containing
images of different types of cats and dogs. The algorithm is never trained upon the given dataset,
which means it does not have any idea about the features of the dataset. The task of the
unsupervised learning algorithm is to identify the image features on their own. Unsupervised
learning algorithm will perform this task by clustering the image dataset into the groups according
to similarities between images.
Working of Unsupervised Learning

Working of unsupervised learning can be understood by the below diagram:

Here, we have taken an unlabeled input data, which means it is not categorized and corresponding
outputs are also not given. Now, this unlabeled input data is fed to the machine learning model in
order to train it. Firstly, it will interpret the raw data to find the hidden patterns from the data and
then will apply suitable algorithms such as k-means clustering, Decision tree, etc.

Once it applies the suitable algorithm, the algorithm divides the data objects into groups according
to the similarities and difference between the objects.

Why use Unsupervised Learning?

Below are some main reasons which describe the importance of Unsupervised Learning:

• Unsupervised learning is helpful for finding useful insights from the data.
• Unsupervised learning is much similar as a human learns to think by their own experiences,
which makes it closer to the real AI.
• Unsupervised learning works on unlabeled and uncategorized data which make unsupervised
learning more important.
• In real-world, we do not always have input data with the corresponding output so to solve such
cases, we need unsupervised learning.

The input to the unsupervised learning models is as follows:

Unstructured data: May contain noisy (meaningless) data, missing values, or unknown data
Unlabeled data: Data only contains a value for input parameters, there is no targeted value
(output). It is easy to collect as compared to the labeled one in the Supervised approach.
Types of Unsupervised Learning Algorithm

There are mainly 3 types of Algorithms which are used for Unsupervised dataset.

• Clustering
• Association Rule Learning
• Dimensionality Reduction

Clustering

Clustering in unsupervised machine learning is the process of grouping unlabeled data into clusters
based on their similarities. The goal of clustering is to identify patterns and relationships in the
data without any prior knowledge of the data’s meaning.

Broadly this technique is applied to group data based on different patterns, such as similarities or
differences, our machine model finds. These algorithms are used to process raw, unclassified data
objects into groups. For example, in the above figure, we have not given output parameter values,
so this technique will be used to group clients based on the input parameters provided by our data.

Association Rule Learning

Association rule learning is also known as association rule mining is a common technique used to
discover associations in unsupervised machine learning. This technique is a rule-based ML
technique that finds out some very useful relations between parameters of a large data set. This
technique is basically used for market basket analysis that helps to better understand the
relationship between different products. For e.g. shopping stores use algorithms based on this
technique to find out the relationship between the sale of one product w.r.t to another’s sales based
on customer behavior. Like if a customer buys milk, then he may also buy bread, eggs, or butter.
Once trained well, such models can be used to increase their sales by planning different offers.

Dimensionality Reduction

Dimensionality reduction is the process of reducing the number of features in a dataset while
preserving as much information as possible. This technique is useful for improving the
performance of machine learning algorithms and for data visualization. Dimensionality reduction
is the process of reducing the number of features in a dataset while preserving as much information
as possible.
Advantages of Unsupervised learning

• No labeled data required: Unlike supervised learning, unsupervised learning does not require
labeled data, which can be expensive and time-consuming to collect.
• Can uncover hidden patterns: Unsupervised learning algorithms can identify patterns and
relationships in data that may not be obvious to humans.
• Can be used for a variety of tasks: Unsupervised learning can be used for a variety of tasks,
such as clustering, dimensionality reduction, and anomaly detection.
• Can be used to explore new data: Unsupervised learning can be used to explore new data and
gain insights that may not be possible with other methods.

Disadvantages of Unsupervised learning

• Difficult to evaluate: It can be difficult to evaluate the performance of unsupervised learning

algorithms, as there are no predefined labels or categories against which to compare results.
• Can be difficult to interpret: It can be difficult to understand the decision-making process of
unsupervised learning models.
• Can be sensitive to the quality of the data: Unsupervised learning algorithms can be sensitive
to the quality of the input data. Noisy or incomplete data can lead to misleading or inaccurate
results.
• Can be computationally expensive: Some unsupervised learning algorithms, particularly those
dealing with high-dimensional data or large datasets, can be computationally expensive.

Applications of Unsupervised learning

• Customer segmentation: Unsupervised learning can be used to segment customers into groups
based on their demographics, behavior, or preferences. This can help businesses to better
understand their customers and target them with more relevant marketing campaigns.
• Fraud detection: Unsupervised learning can be used to detect fraud in financial data by
identifying transactions that deviate from the expected patterns. This can help to prevent fraud
by flagging these transactions for further investigation.
• Recommendation systems: Unsupervised learning can be used to recommend items to users
based on their past behavior or preferences. For example, a recommendation system might use
unsupervised learning to identify users who have similar taste in movies, and then recommend
movies that those users have enjoyed.
• Natural language processing (NLP): Unsupervised learning is used in a variety of NLP tasks,
including topic modeling, document clustering, and part-of-speech tagging.
• Image analysis: Unsupervised learning is used in a variety of image analysis tasks, including
image segmentation, object detection, and image pattern recognition.