Unsupervised Learning

What Does Unsupervised Learning Mean?

Unsupervised learning is a method used to enable machines to classify both tangible and intangible objects without providing the machines any prior information about the objects. The things machines need to classify are varied, such as customer purchasing habits, behavioral patterns of bacteria and hacker attacks. The main idea behind unsupervised learning is to expose the machines to large volumes of varied data and allow it to learn and infer from the data. However, the machines must first be programmed to learn from data.

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Techopedia Explains Unsupervised Learning

Computer systems need to make sense of large volumes of both structured and unstructured data and provide insights. In reality, it may not be feasible to provide prior information about all types of data that a computer system may receive over a period of time. Keeping this in mind, supervised learning may not be suitable when computer systems need constant information about new types of data. For example, hacking attacks on financial systems or bank servers tend to change their nature and patterns frequently, and unsupervised learning may be more appropriate in such cases since the systems need to be enabled to quickly learn from attack data and infer the kinds of future attacks and suggest preemptive actions.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…