You're reading from Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms Expert techniques for implementing popular machine learning algorithms, fine-tuning your models, and understanding how they work

Product type Paperback

Published in Jan 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781838820299

Length 798 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Keras

Concepts

Machine Learning

Authors (2):

Giuseppe Bonaccorso

View More author details

Table of Contents (28) Chapters

Preface

1. Machine Learning Model Fundamentals

2. Loss Functions and Regularization FREE CHAPTER

3. Introduction to Semi-Supervised Learning

4. Advanced Semi-Supervised Classification

5. Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning

6. Clustering and Unsupervised Models

7. Advanced Clustering and Unsupervised Models

8. Clustering and Unsupervised Models for Marketing

9. Generalized Linear Models and Regression

10. Introduction to Time-Series Analysis

11. Bayesian Networks and Hidden Markov Models

12. The EM Algorithm

13. Component Analysis and Dimensionality Reduction

14. Hebbian Learning

15. Fundamentals of Ensemble Learning

16. Advanced Boosting Algorithms

17. Modeling Neural Networks

18. Optimizing Neural Networks

19. Deep Convolutional Networks

20. Recurrent Neural Networks

21. Autoencoders

22. Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks

23. Deep Belief Networks

24. Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

25. Advanced Policy Estimation Algorithms

26. Other Books You May Enjoy

27. Index

K-means

When we discussed the Gaussian mixture algorithm, we defined it as soft K-means. The reason is that each cluster was represented by three elements: mean, variance, and weight. Each sample always belongs to all clusters with a probability provided by the Gaussian distributions. This approach can be very useful when it's possible to manage the probabilities as weights, but in many other situations, it's preferable to determine a single cluster per sample.

Such an approach is called hard clustering and K-means can be considered the hard version of a Gaussian mixture. In fact, when all variances , the distributions degenerate to Dirac deltas , which represent perfect spikes centered at a specific point (even if they are not real functions but distributions). In this scenario, the only possibility to determine the most appropriate cluster is to find the shortest distance between a sample point and all the centers (from now on, we are going to call them centroids...