AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is unsupervised learning?
Unsupervised learning: Learning structure from data that has no answers attached. The algorithm looks for groupings, compressed representations or unusual points on its own. It is useful for exploring data and for cases where labelling is too expensive, but there is no single correct answer to check the result against.
Unsupervised learning: an example
A retailer feeds purchase histories of 2 lakh customers into a grouping algorithm and discovers a cluster of festival-only buyers nobody had defined beforehand.
Related terms
More ML fundamentals terms
- Validation curve
- Validation set
- VC dimension
- Weak supervision
- Ablation study
- Active learning
- Akaike information criterion
- Annotation
Where you learn it
Unsupervised learning is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.