Algorithms of the Intelligent Web, Second Edition

Chapter 2. Extracting structure from data: clustering and transforming your data

This chapter covers

• Features and the feature space
• Expectation maximization—a way of training algorithms
• Transforming your data axes to better represent your data

In the previous chapter, you got your feet wet with the concept of intelligent algorithms. From this chapter onward, we’re going to concentrate on the specifics of machine-learning and predictive-analytics algorithms. If you’ve ever wondered what types of algorithms are out there and how they work, then these chapters are for you!

This chapter is specifically about the structure of data. That is, given a dataset, are there certain patterns and rules that describe it? For example, if we have a data ...