Machine Learning: End-to-End guide for Java developers

Chapter 3. Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques

In the last chapter, we focused on supervised learning, that is, learning from a training dataset that was labeled. In the real world, obtaining data with labels is often difficult. In many domains, it is virtually impossible to label data either due to the cost of labeling or difficulty in labeling due to the sheer volume or velocity at which data is generated. In those situations, unsupervised learning, in its various forms, offers the right approaches to explore, visualize, and perform descriptive and predictive modeling. In many applications, unsupervised learning is often coupled with supervised learning as a first step to isolate interesting data elements for labeling.

In this chapter, ...