The document discusses unsupervised learning techniques, specifically cluster analysis, including applications in customer segmentation, item discovery, and anomaly detection. It outlines various use cases, such as grouping mobile game users by usage and clustering loans by application profiles. The document also explores methods for identifying anomalous behavior and ensuring model competence through anomaly detection strategies.

1. September 8-9, 2016

2. BigML, Inc 2
Cluster Analysis
Poul Petersen
CIO, BigML, Inc
Finding Similarities

3. BigML, Inc 3Unsupervised Learning
Trees vs Clusters
Trees (Supervised Learning)
Provide: labeled data
Learning Task: be able to predict label
Clusters (Unsupervised Learning)
Provide: unlabeled data
Learning Task: group data by similarity

4. BigML, Inc 4Unsupervised Learning
Trees vs Clusters
sepal
length
sepal
width
petal
length
petal
width
species
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
5.7 2.6 3.5 1.0 versicolor
6.7 2.5 5.8 1.8 virginica
… … … … …
sepal
length
sepal
width
petal
length
petal
width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
5.7 2.6 3.5 1.0
6.7 2.5 5.8 1.8
… … … …
Inputs “X” Label “Y”
Learning Task:
Find function “f” such that:
f(X)≈Y
Learning Task:
Find “k” clusters such that
the data in each cluster is self
similar

5. BigML, Inc 5Unsupervised Learning
Use Cases
• Customer segmentation
• Item discovery
• Similarity
• Recommender
• Active learning

6. BigML, Inc 6Unsupervised Learning
Customer Segmentation
GOAL: Cluster the users by usage
statistics. Identify clusters with a
higher percentage of high LTV users.
Since they have similar usage
patterns, the remaining users in
these clusters may be good
candidates for up-sell.
• Dataset of mobile game users.
• Data for each user consists of usage
statistics and a LTV based on in-game
purchases
• Assumption: Usage correlates to LTV
0%
3%
1%

7. BigML, Inc 7Unsupervised Learning
Item Discovery
GOAL: Cluster the whiskies by flavor
profile to discover whiskies that have
similar taste.
• Dataset of 86 whiskies
• Each whiskey scored on a scale from
0 to 4 for each of 12 possible flavor
characteristics.
Smoky
Fruity

8. BigML, Inc 8Unsupervised Learning
Clustering Demo #1

9. BigML, Inc 9Unsupervised Learning
Similarity
GOAL: Cluster the loans by
application profile to rank loan
quality by percentage of trouble
loans in population
• Dataset of Lending Club Loans
• Mark any loan that is currently or has
even been late as “trouble”
0%
3%
7%
1%

10. BigML, Inc 10Unsupervised Learning
Active Learning
GOAL: Rather than sample randomly, use clustering to group
patients by similarity and then test a sample from each cluster
to label the data.
• Dataset of diagnostic measurements
of 768 patients.
• Want to test each patient for diabetes
and label the dataset to build a model
but the test is expensive*.

11. BigML, Inc 11Unsupervised Learning
*For a more realistic example of high cost, imagine a dataset
with a billion transactions, each one needing to be labelled as
fraud/not-fraud. Or a million images which need to be labeled as
cat/not-cat.
2323
Active Learning

12. BigML, Inc 12Unsupervised Learning
Human Example
Cluster into 3 groups…

13. BigML, Inc 13Unsupervised Learning
Human Example

14. BigML, Inc 14Unsupervised Learning
Learning from Humans
• Jesa used prior knowledge to select possible
features that separated the objects.
• “round”, “skinny”, “edges”, “hard”, etc
• Items were then clustered based on the chosen
features
• Separation quality was then tested to ensure:
• met criteria of K=3
• groups were sufficiently “distant”
• no crossover

15. BigML, Inc 15Unsupervised Learning
Learning from Humans
• Length/Width
• greater than 1 => “skinny”
• equal to 1 => “round”
• less than 1 => invert
• Number of Surfaces
• distinct surfaces require “edges” which have corners
• easier to count
Create features that capture these object differences

16. BigML, Inc 16Unsupervised Learning
Cluster Features
Object Length / Width Num Surfaces
penny 1 3
dime 1 3
knob 1 4
eraser 2.75 6
box 1 6
block 1.6 6
screw 8 3
battery 5 3
key 4.25 3
bead 1 2

17. BigML, Inc 17Unsupervised Learning
Plot by Features
K=3
Num
Surfaces
Length / Width
box block eraser
knob
penny
dime
bead
key battery screw
K-Means Key Insight:
We can find clusters using distances
in n-dimensional feature space

18. BigML, Inc 18Unsupervised Learning
Plot by Features
Num
Surfaces
Length / Width
box block eraser
knob
penny
dime
bead
key battery screw
K-Means
Find “best” (minimum distance)
circles that include all points

19. BigML, Inc 19Unsupervised Learning
K-Means Algorithm
K=3

20. BigML, Inc 20Unsupervised Learning
K-Means Algorithm
K=3

21. BigML, Inc 21Unsupervised Learning
Features Matter
Metal Other
Wood

22. BigML, Inc 22Unsupervised Learning
Convergence
Convergence guaranteed
but not necessarily unique
Starting points important (K++)

23. BigML, Inc 23Unsupervised Learning
Starting Points
• Random points or instances in n-dimensional space
• Chose points “farthest” away from each other
• but this is sensitive to outliers
• k++
• the first center is chosen randomly from instances
• each subsequent center is chosen from the
remaining instances with probability proportional to
its squared distance from the point's closest existing
cluster center

24. BigML, Inc 24Unsupervised Learning
Scaling
price
number of bedrooms
d = 160,000
d = 1

25. BigML, Inc 25Unsupervised Learning
Other Tricks
• What is the distance to a “missing value”?
• What is the distance between categorical values?
• What is the distance between text features?
• Does it have to be Euclidean distance?
• Unknown “K”?

26. BigML, Inc 26Unsupervised Learning
Distance to Missing Value?
• Nonsense! Try replacing missing values with:
• Maximum
• Mean
• Median
• Minimum
• Zero
• Ignore instances with missing values

27. BigML, Inc 27Unsupervised Learning
Distance to Categorical?
• Special distance function
• if valA == valB then
distance = 0 (or scaling value)
else
distance = 1
• Assign centroid the most common category of the
member instances
Approach: similar to “k-prototypes”

28. BigML, Inc 28Unsupervised Learning
Distance to Categorical?
feature_1 feature_2 feature_3
instance_1 red cat ball
instance_2 red cat ball
instance_3 red cat box
instance_4 blue dog fridge
D = 0
D = 1
D = sqrt(3)
Compute Euclidean distance between discrete vectors

29. BigML, Inc 29Unsupervised Learning
Text Vectors
1
Cosine Similarity
0
"hippo" "safari" "zebra" ….
1 0 0 …
1 1 0 …
0 0 0 …
Text Field #1
Text Field #2
Cosine Distance = 1 - Cosine Similarity
Features(thousands)

30. BigML, Inc 30Unsupervised Learning
Finding K: G-Means

31. BigML, Inc 31Unsupervised Learning
Finding K: G-Means

32. BigML, Inc 32Unsupervised Learning
Finding K: G-Means
Let K=2
Keep 1, Split 1
New K=3

33. BigML, Inc 33Unsupervised Learning
Finding K: G-Means
Let K=3
Keep 1, Split 2
New K=5

34. BigML, Inc 34Unsupervised Learning
Finding K: G-Means
Let K=5
K=5

35. BigML, Inc 35Unsupervised Learning
Clustering Demo #2

36. BigML, Inc 2
Anomaly Detection
Poul Petersen
CIO, BigML, Inc
Finding the Unusual

37. BigML, Inc 3Unsupervised Learning
Clusters vs Anomalies
Clusters (Unsupervised Learning)
Provide: unlabeled data
Learning Task: group data by similarity
Anomalies (Unsupervised Learning)
Provide: unlabeled data
Learning Task: Rank data by dissimilarity

38. BigML, Inc 4Unsupervised Learning
Clusters vs Anomalies
sepal
length
sepal
width
petal
length
petal
width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
5.7 2.6 3.5 1.0
6.7 2.5 5.8 1.8
… … … …
Learning Task:
Find “k” clusters such that the data
in each cluster is self similar
sepal
length
sepal
width
petal
length
petal
width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
5.7 2.6 3.5 1.0
6.7 2.5 5.8 1.8
… … … …
Learning Task:
Assign value from 0 (similar) to 1
(dissimilar) to each instance.

39. BigML, Inc 5Unsupervised Learning
• Unusual instance discovery
• Intrusion Detection
• Fraud
• Identify Incorrect Data
• Remove Outliers
• Model Competence / Input Data Drift
Use Cases

40. BigML, Inc 6Unsupervised Learning
Removing Outliers
• Models need to generalize
• Outliers negatively impact generalization
GOAL: Use anomaly detector to identify most anomalous
points and then remove them before modeling.
DATASET FILTERED
DATASET
ANOMALY
DETECTOR
CLEAN
MODEL

41. BigML, Inc 7Unsupervised Learning
Anomaly Demo #1

42. BigML, Inc 8Unsupervised Learning
Intrusion Detection
GOAL: Identify unusual command line behavior per user and
across all users that might indicate an intrusion.
• Dataset of command line history for users
• Data for each user consists of commands,
flags, working directories, etc.
• Assumption: Users typically issue the same
flag patterns and work in certain directories
Per User Per Dir All User All Dir

43. BigML, Inc 9Unsupervised Learning
Fraud
• Dataset of credit card transactions
• Additional user profile information
GOAL: Cluster users by profile and use multiple anomaly
scores to detect transactions that are anomalous on multiple
levels.
Card Level User Level Similar User Level

44. BigML, Inc 10Unsupervised Learning
Model Competence
• After putting a model it into production,
data that is being predicted can become
statistically different than the training data.
• Train an anomaly detector at the same time
as the model.
G O A L : F o r e v e r y
prediction, compute
an anomaly score.
If the anomaly score is
high, then the model
may not be competent
and should not be
Training Data
PREDICTION
ANOMALY
SCORE
MODEL
ANOMALY
DETECTOR

45. BigML, Inc 11Unsupervised Learning
Univariate Approach
• Single variable: heights, test scores, etc
• Assume the value is distributed “normally”
• Compute standard deviation
• a measure of how “spread out” the numbers are
• the square root of the variance (The average of the
squared differences from the Mean.)
• Depending on the number of instances, choose a
“multiple” of standard deviations to indicate an anomaly.
A multiple of 3 for 1000 instances removes ~ 3 outliers.

46. BigML, Inc 12Unsupervised Learning
Univariate Approach
measurement
frequency
outliersoutliers
• Available in BigML API

47. BigML, Inc 13Unsupervised Learning
Benford’s Law
• In real-life numeric sets the small digits occur disproportionately often as
leading significant digits.
• Applications include:
• accounting records
• electricity bills
• street addresses
• stock prices
• population numbers
• death rates
• lengths of rivers
• Available in BigML API

48. BigML, Inc 14Unsupervised Learning
Human Example
Most Unusual?

49. BigML, Inc 15Unsupervised Learning
Human Example
“Round”“Skinny” “Corners”
“Skinny”
but not “smooth”
No
“Corners”
Not
“Round”
Key Insight
The “most unusual” object
is different in some way from
every partition of the features.
Most unusual

50. BigML, Inc 16Unsupervised Learning
Human Example
• Human used prior knowledge to select possible
features that separated the objects.
• “round”, “skinny”, “smooth”, “corners”
• Items were then separated based on the chosen
features
• Each cluster was then examined to see which
object fit the least well in its cluster and did not fit
any other cluster

51. BigML, Inc 17Unsupervised Learning
Learning from Humans
• Length/Width
• greater than 1 => “skinny”
• equal to 1 => “round”
• less than 1 => invert
• Number of Surfaces
• distinct surfaces require “edges” which have corners
• easier to count
• Smooth - true or false
Create features that capture these object differences

52. BigML, Inc 18Unsupervised Learning
Anomaly Features
Object Length / Width Num Surfaces Smooth
penny 1 3 TRUE
dime 1 3 TRUE
knob 1 4 TRUE
eraser 2.75 6 TRUE
box 1 6 TRUE
block 1.6 6 TRUE
screw 8 3 FALSE
battery 5 3 TRUE
key 4.25 3 FALSE
bead 1 2 TRUE

53. BigML, Inc 19Unsupervised Learning
smooth = True
length/width > 5
box
blockeraser
knob
penny
dime
bead
key
battery
screw
num surfaces = 6
length/width =1
length/width < 2
Random Splits
Know that “splits” matter - don’t know the order

54. BigML, Inc 20Unsupervised Learning
Isolation Forest
Grow a random decision tree until
each instance is in its own leaf
“easy” to isolate
“hard” to isolate
Depth
Now repeat the process several times and
use average Depth to compute anomaly
score: 0 (similar) -> 1 (dissimilar)

55. BigML, Inc 21Unsupervised Learning
Isolation Forest Scoring
f_1 f_2 f_3
i_1 red cat ball
i_2 red cat ball
i_3 red cat box
i_4 blue dog pen
D = 3
D = 6
D = 2
Score

56. BigML, Inc 22Unsupervised Learning
• A low anomaly score means the loan is similar to the
modeled loans.
• A high anomaly score means you can not trust the
model.
Model Competence
Prediction T T
Confidence
86% 84%
Anomaly
Score
0.5367 0.7124
Competent? Y N
OPEN LOANS
PREDICTION
ANOMALY
SCORE
CLOSED LOAN
MODEL
CLOSED LOAN
ANOMALY DETECTOR

57. BigML, Inc 23Unsupervised Learning
Anomaly Demo #2