Diving deep into UL
It’s time to see some examples of UL, given that we’ve spent some time on SL algorithms.
When to use UL
There are many times when UL can be appropriate. Some very common examples include the following:
- There is no clear response variable. There is nothing that we are explicitly trying to predict or correlate to other variables.
- To extract structure from data where no apparent structure or patterns exist (can be an SL problem).
- When an unsupervised concept called feature extraction is used. Feature extraction is the process of creating new features from existing ones. These new features can be even stronger than the original features.
The first tends to be the most common reason that data scientists choose to use UL. This case arises frequently when we are working with data and we are not explicitly trying to predict any of the columns, and we merely wish to find patterns of similar (and dissimilar) groups of points. The...
