Beginning Data Science in R 4: Data Analysis, Visualization, and Modelling for the Data Scientist

© Thomas Mailund 2022

T. MailundBeginning Data Science in R 4https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8155-0_7

7. Unsupervised Learning

Thomas Mailund¹  

(1)

Aarhus, Denmark

 

For supervised learning, we have one or more targets we want to predict using a set of explanatory variables. But not all data analysis consists of making prediction models. Sometimes, we are just trying to find out what structure is actually in the data we analyze. There can be several reasons for this. Sometimes, unknown structures can tell us more about the data. Sometimes, we want to explicitly avoid unknown structures (if we have data sets that are supposed to be similar, we don’t want to discover later that there are systematic differences). Whatever the reason, unsupervised learning ...