Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Unsupervised Learning Techniques

Although most of the applications of Machine Learning today are based on supervised learning (and as a result, this is where most of the investments go to), the vast majority of the available data is unlabeled: we have the input features X, but we do not have the labels y. The computer scientist Yann LeCun famously said that “if intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake.” In other words, there is a huge potential in unsupervised learning that we have only barely started to sink our teeth into.

Say you want to create a system that will take a few pictures of each item on a manufacturing production line and detect which items are defective. You can fairly easily create a system that will take pictures automatically, and this might give you thousands of pictures every day. You can then build a reasonably large dataset in just a few weeks. But wait, there are no labels! If you want to train a regular binary classifier that will predict whether an item is defective or not, you will need to label every single picture as “defective” or “normal.” This will generally require human experts to sit down and manually go through all the pictures. This is a long, costly, and tedious task, so it will usually only be done on a small subset of the available pictures. As a result, the labeled dataset will be quite small, ...