After doing these courses, I feel confident creating professional visualizations and dashboards
Shoebur RahmanProcurement Specialist, Giz Bangladesh
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.
Prerequisites
Curriculum
Course outline
1
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.
- Unsupervised learning: basics50 XP
- Unsupervised learning in real world50 XP
- Pokémon sightings100 XP
- Basics of cluster analysis50 XP
- Pokémon sightings: hierarchical clustering100 XP
- Pokémon sightings: k-means clustering100 XP
- Data preparation for cluster analysis50 XP
- Normalize basic list data100 XP
- Visualize normalized data100 XP
- Normalization of small numbers100 XP
- FIFA 18: Normalize data100 XP
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
Cluster Analysis in Python
Course
Complete
