Unsupervised learning

How it is used

Typical methods are clustering, dimensionality reduction and anomaly detection. It helps when labels are expensive or impossible to get. A related idea, self-supervised learning, creates its own labels from the data and is how LLMs are pretrained.

Example sentences

1. We used unsupervised learning to group support tickets before anyone had labeled them.

2. Unsupervised learning flagged a group of payments that later turned out to be fraud.

Common collocations

• unsupervised learning method
• unsupervised model
• unsupervised anomaly detection
• self-supervised learning

Related terms

• supervised learningA type of machine learning in which the model learns from examples that come with correct answers (labels), so that it can predict the answer for new examples.
• clusteringAn unsupervised task that groups similar items together without predefined labels, for example sorting customers into segments by how they shop.
• reinforcement learningA type of machine learning in which an agent learns by trial and error, taking actions in an environment and receiving rewards or penalties for the results.
• embeddingA list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item in such a way that items with similar meanings end up close to each other.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• unsupervised learning · Software Engineering

More terms: Machine Learning Basics

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• classification
• regression
• state-of-the-art