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Overview of Unsupervised Learning

Overview of Unsupervised Learning

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29 views

Overview of Unsupervised Learning

Overview of Unsupervised Learning

Uploaded by

rohit
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Certainly!

Let's explore unsupervised learning in detail, covering an overview and examples of


clustering algorithms and dimensionality reduction techniques:

**1. Overview of Unsupervised Learning:**

Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning where the algorithm learns patterns and
structures from unlabeled data, without explicit guidance or supervision. Unlike supervised learning,
there are no predefined output labels to guide the learning process. Instead, unsupervised learning
algorithms aim to discover hidden patterns, group similar data points, or reduce the dimensionality
of the data. Unsupervised learning is commonly used for tasks such as clustering, dimensionality
reduction, and anomaly detection.

**2. Clustering Algorithms:**

Clustering algorithms are used to partition a dataset into groups, or clusters, such that data points
within the same cluster are more similar to each other than to those in other clusters. Here are two
commonly used clustering algorithms:

- **K-Means Clustering:** K-means is a centroid-based clustering algorithm that partitions the data
into K clusters by iteratively assigning each data point to the nearest cluster centroid and updating
the centroids based on the mean of the data points assigned to each cluster. The algorithm aims to
minimize the within-cluster variance, resulting in compact and well-separated clusters.

- **Hierarchical Clustering:** Hierarchical clustering builds a hierarchy of clusters by recursively


merging or splitting clusters based on their similarity. There are two main approaches to hierarchical
clustering: agglomerative and divisive. In agglomerative clustering, each data point starts as a
separate cluster, and clusters are successively merged based on their similarity until a single cluster
containing all data points is formed. In divisive clustering, all data points initially belong to a single
cluster, which is then recursively split into smaller clusters.

**3. Dimensionality Reduction Techniques:**

Dimensionality reduction techniques are used to reduce the number of features in a dataset while
preserving important information and minimizing loss of information. Here are two commonly used
dimensionality reduction techniques:

- **Principal Component Analysis (PCA):** PCA is a linear dimensionality reduction technique that
identifies the directions, or principal components, that capture the maximum variance in the data. It
projects the data onto a lower-dimensional subspace defined by the principal components, allowing
for a compact representation of the data while retaining most of its variability. PCA is widely used for
data visualization, noise reduction, and feature extraction.

- **t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE):** t-SNE is a nonlinear dimensionality


reduction technique that is particularly well-suited for visualizing high-dimensional data in low-
dimensional space (usually 2D or 3D). It aims to preserve the local structure of the data by modeling
the similarity between data points in high-dimensional space and embedding them in a lower-
dimensional space. t-SNE is commonly used for exploratory data analysis and visualization of
complex datasets, such as images or natural language data.

These are just a few examples of clustering algorithms and dimensionality reduction techniques used
in unsupervised learning. Depending on the specific characteristics of the data and the desired
outcomes, different algorithms and techniques may be more suitable, and it is often necessary to
experiment with multiple approaches to find the most effective solution. Evaluation metrics such as
silhouette score, Davies–Bouldin index, and visual inspection are commonly used to assess the
quality of clustering results and dimensionality reduction.

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