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Unsupervised learning: Given input-only data, the objective of unsupervised
learning is to find something useful in the data. Due to this
ambiguous definition, unsupervised learning research tends to be more
ad hoc than supervised learning. Nevertheless, unsupervised learning is
regarded as one of the most important tools in data mining because
of its automatic and inexpensive nature. Typical tasks of unsupervised
learning include clustering (grouping the data based on their similarity),
density estimation (estimating the probability distribution behind the
data), anomaly detection (removing outliers from the data), data visual-
ization (reducing the dimensionality of the data to 1–3 dimensions), and
blind source separation (extracting the original source signals from their
mixtures). Also, unsupervised learning methods are sometimes used as
data pre-processing tools in supervised learning.
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