Applications of Unsupervised learning using k-means cluster or Association rules - machine-learning

I have been looking into some applications for unsupervised learning, but have only found some hypothetical applications on the internet, for example unsupervised learning could be used for, say, fraud detection. For example, for supervised learning you have the instant physician which is being implemented in the real world. However, for unsupervised learning, the applications seem to be hypothetical, thus are actually being implemented or are they just hypothetical?

There are lots of applications of unsupervised learning and there are various techniques that help us achieve these applications.I will brief out some of them
1) Image Segmentation - wherein you divide your image into different regions and then cluster them to objectify them.
2) Netflix movie recommendation system wherein those movies which are watched by a user are put into one cluster. Here unsupervised learning plays a important role in determining those movies and then recommending other such/similar movies to that user.
3) Amazon shopping where similar users based on their shopping history, amount paid for items, visiting particular type of items are all put in one clusters which help these giants to look into these factors and then recommend only those things to you.
To achieve these and others one requires unsupervised learning based techniques. Some techniques like k-means, hierarchical clustering, Density based clustering are extensively used for real- world applications.
These are just few of the many applications of unsupervised learning.
Hope this clarify.

Related

Do unsupervised machine learning model features need to be independent?

I'm training an unsupervised machine learning model and want to make sure my features are as useful as possible!
Do unsupervised machine learning model featured need to be independent? For example, I have a feature (subscriptionId) that is the subscription Id of different cloud accounts within a Tenant. I also have a feature that is the resourceId of a resource within the subscription.
However, this resourceId contains the subscriptionId. Is it best practice to combine these features or remove one feature (e.g. subscriptionId) to avoid dependence and duplication among dataset features?
For unsupervised learning, commonly used for clustering, association, or dimensionality reduction, features don't need to be fully independent, but if you have many unique values it's likely that your models can learn to differentiate on these high entropy values instead of learning interesting or significant things as you might hope.
If you're working on generative unsupervised models, for customers, I cannot express how much risk this may create, for security and secret disclosure, for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customers. Generative models are premised on regurgitating their inputs, and thousands of papers have been written on getting private information back out of trained models.
It's not clear what problem you're working on, and the question seems early in its formulation.
I recommend you spend time delving into the limits of statistics and data science, which are the foundation of modern popular machine learning methods.
Once you have an idea of what questions can be answered well by ML, and what can't, then you might consider something like fastAI's course.
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-actual-difference-between-statistics-and-machine-learning-64b49f07ea3
https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.4642
Again, depending on how the outputs will be used or who can view or (even indirectly) query the model, it seems unwise to train on private values, especially if you want to generate outputs. ML methods are only useful if you have access to a lot of data, and if you have access to the data of many users, you need to be good steward of Oracle Cloud customer data.

Research paper has Supervised and Unsupervised Learning definition [closed]

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I am looking for some Research paper or books have good, basic definiton of what Supervised and Unsupervised Learning is. So that i am able to quote these definition in my project.
Thank you so much.
I would make a reference to the following book: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) 3rd Edition by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. In more detail in Chapter 18 and in pages 693 and on there is an analysis of supervised and unsupervised learning. About unsupervised learning:
In unsupervised learning, the agent learns patterns in the input
even though no explicit feedback is supplied.
The most common unsupervised learning task is clustering:
detecting potentially useful clusters of input examples.
For example, a taxi agent might gradually develop a concept
of “good traffic days” and “bad traffic days” without ever being
given labeled examples of each by a teacher
While for supervised:
In supervised learning, the agent observes some example input–output
pairs
and learns a function that maps from input to output. In component 1 above,
the inputs are percepts and the output are provided by a teacher
who says “Brake!” or “Turn left.” In component 2, the inputs are camera
images and the outputs again come from a teacher who says “that’s a bus.”
In 3, the theory of braking is a function from states and braking actions
to stopping distance in feet. In this case the output value is available
directly from the agent’s percepts (after the fact); the environment
is the teacher.
The examples are mentioned in the text above.
Christopher M. Bishop, "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning", p.3 (emphasis mine)
Applications in which the training data comprises examples of the input vectors along with their corresponding target vectors are known as supervised learning problems...
In other pattern recognition problems, the training data consists of a set of input vectors x without any corresponding target values. The goal in such unsupervised learning problems may be to discover groups of similar examples within the data,
where it is called clustering, or to determine the distribution of data within the input space, known as density estimation, or to project the data from a high-dimensional space down to two or three dimensions for the purpose of visualization.
Which is as good as you can get. Basically, the most noticable difference is whether we have labels wrt. which we want learning model to optimize. If we don't have some of the labels, it's still can be described as weakly-supervised learning. If no labels are available,the only thing left is to find some structure in the data.
Thanks #Pavel Tyshevskyi for the answear. Your answer is perfect but it seem a littel but hard to understand for beginers like me.
And after hour of searching, i found my own answer version in "Machine Learning For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition" book, at part "Approaches to Machine Learning" of chapter 1 "Understanding Machine Learning". It has simpler definition and has example that can help me to understand better a bit. Link to the book: Machine Learning For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition
Supervised learning
Supervised learning typically begins with an established set of data and a certain understanding of how that data is classified. Supervised learning is intended to find patterns in data that can be applied to an analytics process. This data has labeled features that define the meaning of data. For example, there could be mil-lions of images of animals and include an explanation of what each animal is and then you can create a machine learning appli-cation that distinguishes one animal from another. By labeling this data about types of animals, you may have hundreds of cat-egories of different species. Because the attributes and the mean-ing of the data have been identified, it is well understood by the users that are training the modeled data so that it fits the details of the labels. When the label is continuous, it is a regression; when the data comes from a finite set of values, it known as classifica-tion. In essence, regression used for supervised learning helps you understand the correlation between variables. An example of supervised learning is weather forecasting. By using regression analysis, weather forecasting takes into account known historical weather patterns and the current conditions to provide a predic-tion on the weather.
The algorithms are trained using preprocessed examples, and at this point, the performance of the algorithms is evaluated with test data. Occasionally, patterns that are identified in a subset of the data can’t be detected in the larger population of data. If the model is fit to only represent the patterns that exist in the training subset, you create a problem called overfitting. Overfit-ting means that your model is precisely tuned for your training data but may not be applicable for large sets of unknown data. To protect against overfitting, testing needs to be done against unforeseen or unknown labeled data. Using unforeseen data for the test set can help you evaluate the accuracy of the model in predicting outcomes and results. Supervised training models have broad applicability to a variety of business problems, including fraud detection, recommendation solutions, speech recognition, or risk analysis.
Unsupervised learning
Unsupervised learning is best suited when the problem requires a massive amount of data that is unlabeled. For example, social media applications, such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and.....

In machine learning which algorithm should I use to recommend, based on different features like rating,type,gender etc

I am developing a website, which will recommend recipes to the visitors based on their data. I am collecting data from their profile, website activity and facebook.
Currently I have data like [username/userId, rating of recipes, age, gender, type(veg/Non veg), cuisine(Italian/Chinese.. etc.)]. With respect to above features I want to recommend new recipes which they have not visited.
I have implemented ALS (alternating least squares) spark algorithm. In this we have to prepare csv which contains [userId,RecipesId,Rating] columns. Then we have to train this data and create the model by adjusting parameters like lamdas, Rank, iteration. This model generated recommendation, using pyspark
model.recommendProducts(userId, numberOfRecommendations)
The ALS algorithm accepts only three features userId, RecipesId, Rating. I am unable to include more features (like type, cuisine, gender etc.) apart from which I have mentioned above (userId, RecipesId, Rating). I want to include those features, then train the model and generate recommendations.
Is there any other algorithm in which I can include above parameters and generate recommendation.
Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.
Yes, there are couple of others algorithms. For your case, I would suggest that you Naive Bayes algorithm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier
Since you are working on a web application, a JS solution, I guess, would come handy to you.
(simple) https://www.npmjs.com/package/bayes
or for example:
(a bit more powerful) https://www.npmjs.com/package/naivebayesclassifier
There are algorithms called recommender systems in machine learning. In this we have content based recommender systems. They are mainly used to recommend products/movies based on customer reviews. You can apply the same algorithm using customer reviews to recommend recipes. For better understanding of this algorithm refer this links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv6VkpvEeRw&list=PL0Smm0jPm9WcCsYvbhPCdizqNKps69W4Z&index=97
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uxXPzm-7FY
You can go with powerful classification algorithms like
->SVM: works very well if you have more number of attributes.
->Logistic Regression: if you have huge data of customers.
You are looking for recommender systems using algorithms like collaborative filtering. I would suggest you to go through Prof.Andrew Ng's short videos on collaborative filtering algorithm and low-rank matrix factorization and also building recommender systems. They are a part of Coursera's Machine learning course offered by Stanford University.
The course link:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning#%20
You can check week 9 for the content related to recommender systems.

How to approach a machine learning programming competition

Many machine learning competitions are held in Kaggle where a training set and a set of features and a test set is given whose output label is to be decided based by utilizing a training set.
It is pretty clear that here supervised learning algorithms like decision tree, SVM etc. are applicable. My question is, how should I start to approach such problems, I mean whether to start with decision tree or SVM or some other algorithm or is there is any other approach i.e. how will I decide?
So, I had never heard of Kaggle until reading your post--thank you so much, it looks awesome. Upon exploring their site, I found a portion that will guide you well. On the competitions page (click all competitions), you see Digit Recognizer and Facial Keypoints Detection, both of which are competitions, but are there for educational purposes, tutorials are provided (tutorial isn't available for the facial keypoints detection yet, as the competition is in its infancy. In addition to the general forums, competitions have forums also, which I imagine is very helpful.
If you're interesting in the mathematical foundations of machine learning, and are relatively new to it, may I suggest Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning. It's no cakewalk, but it's much friendlier than its counterparts, without a loss of rigor.
EDIT:
I found the tutorials page on Kaggle, which seems to be a summary of all of their tutorials. Additionally, scikit-learn, a python library, offers a ton of descriptions/explanations of machine learning algorithms.
This cheatsheet http://peekaboo-vision.blogspot.pt/2013/01/machine-learning-cheat-sheet-for-scikit.html is a good starting point. In my experience using several algorithms at the same time can often give better results, eg logistic regression and svm where the results of each one have a predefined weight. And test, test, test ;)
There is No Free Lunch in data mining. You won't know which methods work best until you try lots of them.
That being said, there is also a trade-off between understandability and accuracy in data mining. Decision Trees and KNN tend to be understandable, but less accurate than SVM or Random Forests. Kaggle looks for high accuracy over understandability.
It also depends on the number of attributes. Some learners can handle many attributes, like SVM, whereas others are slow with many attributes, like neural nets.
You can shrink the number of attributes by using PCA, which has helped in several Kaggle competitions.

What is machine learning? [closed]

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What is machine learning ?
What does machine learning code do ?
When we say that the machine learns, does it modify the code of itself or it modifies history (database) which will contain the experience of code for given set of inputs?
What is a machine learning ?
Essentially, it is a method of teaching computers to make and improve predictions or behaviors based on some data. What is this "data"? Well, that depends entirely on the problem. It could be readings from a robot's sensors as it learns to walk, or the correct output of a program for certain input.
Another way to think about machine learning is that it is "pattern recognition" - the act of teaching a program to react to or recognize patterns.
What does machine learning code do ?
Depends on the type of machine learning you're talking about. Machine learning is a huge field, with hundreds of different algorithms for solving myriad different problems - see Wikipedia for more information; specifically, look under Algorithm Types.
When we say machine learns, does it modify the code of itself or it modifies history (Data Base) which will contain the experience of code for given set of inputs ?
Once again, it depends.
One example of code actually being modified is Genetic Programming, where you essentially evolve a program to complete a task (of course, the program doesn't modify itself - but it does modify another computer program).
Neural networks, on the other hand, modify their parameters automatically in response to prepared stimuli and expected response. This allows them to produce many behaviors (theoretically, they can produce any behavior because they can approximate any function to an arbitrary precision, given enough time).
I should note that your use of the term "database" implies that machine learning algorithms work by "remembering" information, events, or experiences. This is not necessarily (or even often!) the case.
Neural networks, which I already mentioned, only keep the current "state" of the approximation, which is updated as learning occurs. Rather than remembering what happened and how to react to it, neural networks build a sort of "model" of their "world." The model tells them how to react to certain inputs, even if the inputs are something that it has never seen before.
This last ability - the ability to react to inputs that have never been seen before - is one of the core tenets of many machine learning algorithms. Imagine trying to teach a computer driver to navigate highways in traffic. Using your "database" metaphor, you would have to teach the computer exactly what to do in millions of possible situations. An effective machine learning algorithm would (hopefully!) be able to learn similarities between different states and react to them similarly.
The similarities between states can be anything - even things we might think of as "mundane" can really trip up a computer! For example, let's say that the computer driver learned that when a car in front of it slowed down, it had to slow down to. For a human, replacing the car with a motorcycle doesn't change anything - we recognize that the motorcycle is also a vehicle. For a machine learning algorithm, this can actually be surprisingly difficult! A database would have to store information separately about the case where a car is in front and where a motorcycle is in front. A machine learning algorithm, on the other hand, would "learn" from the car example and be able to generalize to the motorcycle example automatically.
Machine learning is a field of computer science, probability theory, and optimization theory which allows complex tasks to be solved for which a logical/procedural approach would not be possible or feasible.
There are several different categories of machine learning, including (but not limited to):
Supervised learning
Reinforcement learning
Supervised Learning
In supervised learning, you have some really complex function (mapping) from inputs to outputs, you have lots of examples of input/output pairs, but you don't know what that complicated function is. A supervised learning algorithm makes it possible, given a large data set of input/output pairs, to predict the output value for some new input value that you may not have seen before. The basic method is that you break the data set down into a training set and a test set. You have some model with an associated error function which you try to minimize over the training set, and then you make sure that your solution works on the test set. Once you have repeated this with different machine learning algorithms and/or parameters until the model performs reasonably well on the test set, then you can attempt to use the result on new inputs. Note that in this case, the program does not change, only the model (data) is changed. Although one could, theoretically, output a different program, but that is not done in practice, as far as I am aware. An example of supervised learning would be the digit recognition system used by the post office, where it maps the pixels to labels in the set 0...9, using a large set of pictures of digits that were labeled by hand as being in 0...9.
Reinforcement Learning
In reinforcement learning, the program is responsible for making decisions, and it periodically receives some sort of award/utility for its actions. However, unlike in the supervised learning case, the results are not immediate; the algorithm could prescribe a large sequence of actions and only receive feedback at the very end. In reinforcement learning, the goal is to build up a good model such that the algorithm will generate the sequence of decisions that lead to the highest long term utility/reward. A good example of reinforcement learning is teaching a robot how to navigate by giving a negative penalty whenever its bump sensor detects that it has bumped into an object. If coded correctly, it is possible for the robot to eventually correlate its range finder sensor data with its bumper sensor data and the directions that sends to the wheels, and ultimately choose a form of navigation that results in it not bumping into objects.
More Info
If you are interested in learning more, I strongly recommend that you read Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher M. Bishop or take a machine learning course. You may also be interested in reading, for free, the lecture notes from CIS 520: Machine Learning at Penn.
Machine learning is a scientific discipline that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases. Read more on Wikipedia
Machine learning code records "facts" or approximations in some sort of storage, and with the algorithms calculates different probabilities.
The code itself will not be modified when a machine learns, only the database of what "it knows".
Machine learning is a methodology to create a model based on sample data and use the model to make a prediction or strategy. It belongs to artificial intelligence.
Machine learning is simply a generic term to define a variety of learning algorithms that produce a quasi learning from examples (unlabeled/labeled). The actual accuracy/error is entirely determined by the quality of training/test data you provide to your learning algorithm. This can be measured using a convergence rate. The reason you provide examples is because you want the learning algorithm of your choice to be able to informatively by guidance make generalization. The algorithms can be classed into two main areas supervised learning(classification) and unsupervised learning(clustering) techniques. It is extremely important that you make an informed decision on how you plan on separating your training and test data sets as well as the quality that you provide to your learning algorithm. When you providing data sets you want to also be aware of things like over fitting and maintaining a sense of healthy bias in your examples. The algorithm then basically learns wrote to wrote on the basis of generalization it achieves from the data you have provided to it both for training and then for testing in process you try to get your learning algorithm to produce new examples on basis of your targeted training. In clustering there is very little informative guidance the algorithm basically tries to produce through measures of patterns between data to build related sets of clusters e.g kmeans/knearest neighbor.
some good books:
Introduction to ML (Nilsson/Stanford),
Gaussian Process for ML,
Introduction to ML (Alpaydin),
Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms (very useful book),
Machine Learning (Mitchell),
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (standard ML course book at Edinburgh and various Unis but relatively a heavy reading with math),
Data Mining and Practical Machine Learning with Weka (work through the theory using weka and practice in Java)
Reinforcement Learning there is a free book online you can read:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.html
IR, IE, Recommenders, and Text/Data/Web Mining in general use alot of Machine Learning principles. You can even apply Metaheuristic/Global Optimization Techniques here to further automate your learning processes. e.g apply an evolutionary technique like GA (genetic algorithm) to optimize your neural network based approach (which may use some learning algorithm). You can approach it purely in form of a probablistic machine learning approach for example bayesian learning. Most of these algorithms all have a very heavy use of statistics. Concepts of convergence and generalization are important to many of these learning algorithms.
Machine learning is the study in computing science of making algorithms that are able to classify information they haven't seen before, by learning patterns from training on similar information. There are all sorts of kinds of "learners" in this sense. Neural networks, Bayesian networks, decision trees, k-clustering algorithms, hidden markov models and support vector machines are examples.
Based on the learner, they each learn in different ways. Some learners produce human-understandable frameworks (e.g. decision trees), and some are generally inscrutable (e.g. neural networks).
Learners are all essentially data-driven, meaning they save their state as data to be reused later. They aren't self-modifying as such, at least in general.
I think one of the coolest definitions of machine learning that I've read is from this book by Tom Mitchell. Easy to remember and intuitive.
A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E
Shamelessly ripped from Wikipedia: Machine learning is a scientific discipline that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases.
Quite simply, machine learning code accomplishes a machine learning task. That can be a number of things from interpreting sensor data to a genetic algorithm.
I would say it depends. No, modifying code is not normal, but is not outside the realm of possibility. I would also not say that machine learning always modifies a history. Sometimes we have no history to build off of. Sometime we simply want to react to the environment, but not actually learn from our past experiences.
Basically, machine learning is a very wide-open discipline that contains many methods and algorithms that make it impossible for there to be 1 answer to your 3rd question.
Machine learning is a term that is taken from the real world of a person, and applied on something that can't actually learn - a machine.
To add to the other answers - machine learning will not (usually) change the code, but it might change it's execution path and decision based on previous data or new gathered data and hence the "learning" effect.
there are many ways to "teach" a machine - you give weights to many parameter of an algorithm, and then have the machine solve it for many cases, each time you give her a feedback about the answer and the machine adjusts the weights according to how close the machine answer was to your answer or according to the score you gave it's answer, or according to some results test algorithm.
This is one way of learning and there are many more...

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