Unsupervised Learning

Depesh Banik
Adjunct Faculty
School of Business
Canadian University of Bangladesh
Definition

•Unsupervised learning is a type of machine

learning where algorithms identify patterns
in data without labeled responses.
•The system tries to understand the
underlying structure or distribution in the
data.
Types of Unsupervised Learning
• Clustering:
• Description: Grouping similar items together based on characteristics.
• Example: Customer segmentation where customers are grouped based on purchasing
behavior.
• Association:
• Description: Finding relationships or associations among items.
• Example: Market basket analysis where associations are found between items frequently
bought together.
• Dimensionality Reduction:
• Description: Reducing the number of variables to simplify data.
• Example: Visualizing high-dimensional data by reducing it to two or three dimensions.
 Advantages and Challenges
• Advantages:
• - Can handle large, unlabeled datasets, useful for exploratory data
analysis.
• - Identifies hidden patterns or groupings in data without prior
knowledge.
• Examples: Uncovering customer segments, detecting network intrusions.
• Challenges:
• - Harder to evaluate results due to the lack of labeled data.
- Algorithms can struggle with the optimal number of clusters or patterns
to identify.
 Case Study: Customer Segmentation
• Scenario:
• - A retailer seeks to personalize marketing campaigns.
• Solution:
• - Uses clustering algorithms (like k-means) to group
customers based on purchasing behavior.
• Outcome:
• - Enhanced targeted marketing, improved customer
satisfaction, and increased sales.
Key Takeaways
• - Summary:
• - Unsupervised learning is powerful for discovering hidden
structures in unlabeled data.
• - It is crucial for tasks like customer segmentation,
anomaly detection, and data visualization.
• - It presents both opportunities and challenges,
particularly around result validation and pattern recognition.