Unsupervised Learning
Unsupervised learning is the training of machine using information that is
neither classified nor labelled and allowing the algorithm to act on that information
without guidance. Here the task of machine is to group unsorted information
according to similarities, patterns and differences without any prior training of
data.
Unlike supervised learning, no teacher is provided that means no training
will be given to the machine. Therefore machine is restricted to find the hidden
structure in unlabeled data by our-self.
For instance, suppose it is given an image having both dogs and cats which
have not seen ever.
Thus machine has no any idea about the features of dogs and cat so we
can’t categorize it in dogs and cats. But it can categorize them according to their
similarities, patterns and differences i.e., we can easily categorize the above picture
into two parts. First first may contain all pics having dogs in it and second part
may contain all pics having cats in it. Here you didn’t learn anything before, means
no training data or examples.
Unsupervised learning classified into two categories of algorithms:
Clustering: A clustering problem is where you want to discover the inherent
groupings in the data, such as grouping customers by purchasing behaviour.
Association: An association rule learning problem is where you want to discover
rules that describe large portions of your data, such as people that buy X also tend
to buy Y.
Clustering
Clustering is the task of dividing the population or data points into a
number of groups such that data points in the same groups are more similar to
other data points in the same group than those in other groups. In simple words,
the aim is to segregate groups with similar traits and assign them into clusters.
Types of Clustering
Broadly speaking, clustering can be divided into two sub groups:
Hard Clustering: In hard clustering, each data point either belongs to a cluster
completely or not.
Soft Clustering: In soft clustering, instead of putting each data point into a
separate cluster, a probability or likelihood of that data point to be in those clusters
is assigned.
K-Means
K-means clustering is a type of unsupervised learning, which is used when
you have unlabeled data (i.e., data without defined categories or groups). The goal
of this algorithm is to find groups in the data, with the number of groups
represented by the variable K. The algorithm works iteratively to assign each data
point to one of K groups based on the features that are provided. Data points are
clustered based on feature similarity. The results of the K-means clustering
algorithm are:
The centroids of the K clusters, which can be used to label new data
Labels for the training data (each data point is assigned to a single cluster)
Rather than defining groups before looking at the data, clustering allows you to
find and analyze the groups that have formed organically.
Hierarchical Clustering
Hierarchical clustering, as the name suggests is an algorithm that builds
hierarchy of clusters. This algorithm starts with all the data points assigned to a
cluster of their own. Then two nearest clusters are merged into the same cluster. In
the end, this algorithm terminates when there is only a single cluster left. The
results of hierarchical clustering can be shown using dendrogram.
Fig: Dendrogram representation of Hierarchical Clustering
Applications of Clustering
Clustering has a large no. of applications spread across various domains.
Some of the most popular applications of clustering are:
Recommendation engines
Market segmentation
Social network analysis
Search result grouping
Medical imaging
Image segmentation
Anomaly detection
Association Analysis
Association rules are if-then statements that help to show the probability of
relationships between data items within large data sets in various types of
databases. Association rule mining has a number of applications and is widely
used to help discover sales correlations in transactional data or in medical data
sets.
Association rules working:
Association rule mining, at a basic level, involves the use of machine
learning models to analyze data for patterns, or co-occurrence, in a database. It
identifies frequent if-then associations, which are called association rules.
An association rule has two parts: an antecedent (if) and a consequent
(then). An antecedent is an item found within the data. A consequent is an item
found in combination with the antecedent.
Association rules are created by searching data for frequent if-then patterns
and using the criteria support and confidence to identify the most important
relationships. Support is an indication of how frequently the items appear in the
data. Confidence indicates the number of times the if-then statements are found
true. A third metric, called lift, can be used to compare confidence with expected
confidence.
Areas of Association Rule Mining
Medical diagnosis.
Protein Sequences.
Fraud Detection in Credit Card Transactions.
Bio-Medical Literature.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Census Data