Making Friends with AI

Unsupervised learning demystified

Unsupervised learning may sound like a fancy way to say “let the kids learn on their own not to touch the hot oven” but it’s actually a pattern-finding technique for mining inspiration from your data. It has nothing to do with machines running around without adult supervision, forming their own opinions about things. Let’s demystify!

If this feels familiar, unsupervised machine learning might be your new best friend.

This post is beginner-friendly, but assumes you’re familiar with the story so far:

• Machine learning is all about labeling things using examples.
• If you train your system by feeding it the answers you’re looking for, you’re doing supervised learning.
• To get started with supervised learning you need to know what labels you want. (Not so with unsupervised.)
• Standard jargon includes instance, feature, label, model, and algorithm.

What’s unsupervised learning?