UnSupervised ML

U N S U P E RV I S E D L E A R N I N G I S A M A C H I N E L E A R N I N G P R O B L E M T Y P E I N W H I C H
T R A I N I N G D ATA C O N S I S T S O F A S E T O F I N P U T V E C T O R S B U T N O C O R R E S P O N D I N G
TA R G E T VA L U E S .
Outline
Introduction
Difference between Supervised & Unsupervised ML
Idea behind the type
The idea behind this type of learning is to group information based on similarities,
patterns, and differences.
Unlike in supervised learning problems, unsupervised learning algorithms do
not require input-to-output mappings to learn a mapping function—this is what
is meant when we say, “no teacher is provided to the learning algorithm.”
Consequently, an unsupervised learning algorithm cannot perform classification
or regression.
The role of an unsupervised learning algorithm is to discover the underlying structure of an
unlabeled dataset by itself.
Types of Unsupervised Learning

In the introduction, we mentioned that unsupervised learning is a method we use to group data when
no labels are present. Since no labels are present, unsupervised learning methods are typically applied
to build a concise representation of the data so we can derive imaginative content from it.

For example, if we were releasing a new product, we can use unsupervised learning methods to
identify who the target market for the new product will be: this is because there is no historical
information about who the target customer is and their demographics.
But unsupervised learning can be broken down into three main tasks:
● Clustering
● Association rules
● Dimensionality reduction.
Clustering

From a theoretical standpoint, instances within the same group tend to have similar properties. You can observe this
phenomenon in the periodic table. Members of the same group, separated by eighteen columns, have the same number of
electrons in the outermost shells of their atoms and form bonds of the same type.
This is the idea that’s at play in clustering algorithms; Clustering methods involve grouping untagged data based on their
similarities and differences. When two instances appear in different groups, we can infer they have dissimilar properties.
Clustering is a popular type of unsupervised learning approach. You can even break it down further into different types of
clustering; for example:
● Exlcusive clustering: Data is grouped such that a single data point exclusively belongs to one cluster.

● Overlapping clustering: A soft cluster in which a single data point may belong to multiple clusters with varying
degrees of membership.

● Hierarchical clustering: A type of clustering in which groups are created such that similar instances are within the
same group and different objects are in other groups.

● Probalistic clustering: Clusters are created using probability distribution.

This type of unsupervised machine learning takes a rule-based approach to discovering interesting
relationships between features in a given dataset. It works by using a measure of interest to identify
strong rules found within a dataset.
We typically see association rule mining used for market basket analysis: this is a data mining
technique retailers use to gain a better understanding of customer purchasing patterns based on the
relationships between various products.
The most widely used algorithm for association rule learning is the Apriori algorithm. However, other
algorithms are used for this type of unsupervised learning, such as the Eclat and FP-growth
algorithms.
Dimensionality Reduction

Popular algorithms used for dimensionality reduction include principal component analysis (PCA) and
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). These algorithms seek to transform data from high-dimensional
spaces to low-dimensional spaces without compromising meaningful properties in the original data. These
techniques are typically deployed during exploratory data analysis (EDA) or data processing to prepare the
data for modeling.
It’s helpful to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset during EDA to help visualize data: this is because
visualizing data in more than three dimensions is difficult. From a data processing perspective, reducing the
dimensionality of the data simplifies the modeling problem.
When more input features are being fed into the model, the model must learn a more complex
approximation function. This phenomenon can be summed up by a saying called the “curse of
dimensionality.”
Unsupervised Learning Applications

Most executives would have no problem identifying use cases for supervised machine learning tasks;
the same cannot be said for unsupervised learning.
One reason this may be is down to the simple nature of risk. Unsupervised learning introduces much
more risk than unsupervised learning since there’s no clear way to measure results against ground
truth in an offline manner, and it may be too risky to conduct an online evaluation.
Nonetheless, there are several valuable unsupervised learning use cases at the enterprise level.
Beyond using unsupervised techniques to explore data, some common use cases in the real-world
include:
NLP & Unsupervised

● Natural language processing (NLP). Google News is known to leverage unsupervised learning to
categorize articles based on the same story from various news outlets. For instance, the results of the
football transfer window can all be categorized under football.
● Image and video analysis. Visual Perception tasks such as object recognition leverage unsupervised
learning.
● Anomaly detection. Unsupervised learning is used to identify data points, events, and/or observations
that deviate from a dataset's normal behavior.
Other Application

● Customer segmentation. Interesting buyer persona profiles can be created using unsupervised
learning. This helps businesses to understand their customers' common traits and purchasing
habits, thus, enabling them to align their products more accordingly.
● Recommendation Engines. Past purchase behavior coupled with unsupervised learning can be
used to help businesses discover data trends that they could use to develop effective cross-
selling strategies.