Cluster Analysis in Python

Course Description

You have probably come across Google News, which automatically groups similar news articles under a topic. Have you ever wondered what process runs in the background to arrive at these groups? In this course, you will be introduced to unsupervised learning through clustering using the SciPy library in Python. This course covers pre-processing of data and application of hierarchical and k-means clustering. Through the course, you will explore player statistics from a popular football video game, FIFA 18. After completing the course, you will be able to quickly apply various clustering algorithms on data, visualize the clusters formed and analyze results.

What You’ll Learn

Introduction to Clustering

Before you are ready to classify news articles, you need to be introduced to the basics of clustering. This chapter familiarizes you with a class of machine learning algorithms called unsupervised learning and then introduces you to clustering, one of the popular unsupervised learning algorithms. You will know about two popular clustering techniques – hierarchical clustering and k-means clustering. The chapter concludes with basic pre-processing steps before you start clustering data.

K-Means Clustering

This chapter introduces a different clustering algorithm – k-means clustering – and its implementation in SciPy. K-means clustering overcomes the biggest drawback of hierarchical clustering that was discussed in the last chapter. As dendrograms are specific to hierarchical clustering, this chapter discusses one method to find the number of clusters before running k-means clustering. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the limitations of k-means clustering and discusses considerations while using this algorithm.

Hierarchical Clustering

This chapter focuses on a popular clustering algorithm – hierarchical clustering – and its implementation in SciPy. In addition to the procedure to perform hierarchical clustering, it attempts to help you answer an important question – how many clusters are present in your data? The chapter concludes with a discussion on the limitations of hierarchical clustering and discusses considerations while using hierarchical clustering.

Clustering in Real World

Now that you are familiar with two of the most popular clustering techniques, this chapter helps you apply this knowledge to real-world problems. The chapter first discusses the process of finding dominant colors in an image, before moving on to the problem discussed in the introduction – clustering of news articles. The chapter concludes with a discussion on clustering with multiple variables, which makes it difficult to visualize all the data.