Unsupervised Learning — Finding Structure Without Labels
Most data in the world is unlabeled, and labeling it is expensive — so some of the most useful machine learning finds structure in data with no answer key at all. Unsupervised learning groups similar things, compresses high-dimensional data, and flags the anomalies, all without being told what "right" looks like. This post covers the main unsupervised techniques and, just as importantly, how you tell whether they worked when there's no label to check against.
Most data is unlabeled, and some of the most useful ML finds structure without an answer key. Clustering, dimensionality reduction (the root of embeddings and semantic search), anomaly detection, and the hard problem of evaluating when there's no label to check against.