Summary

In this chapter, we looked at clustering, which is an unsupervised learning approach. We use unsupervised learning to explore data, rather than for classification and prediction purposes. In the experiment here, we didn't have topics for the news items we found on reddit, so we were unable to perform classification. We used k-means clustering to group together these news stories to find common topics and trends in the data.

In pulling data from reddit, we had to extract data from arbitrary websites. This was performed by looking for large text segments, rather than a full-blown machine learning approach. There are some interesting approaches to machine learning for this task that may improve upon these results. In the Appendix of this book, I've listed, for each chapter, avenues for going beyond the scope of the chapter and improving upon the results. This includes references to other sources of information and more difficult applications of the approaches in each chapter.

We also...