Given text documents, we can group them automatically: text clustering. We’ll use KMeans which is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm.

I’ve collected some articles about cats and google. You’ve guessed it: the algorithm will create clusters. The articles can be about anything, the clustering algorithm will create clusters automatically. Even cooler: prediction.

Related course: Complete Machine Learning Course with Python

Kmeans

We create the documents using a Python list. In our example, documents are simply text strings that fit on the screen. In a real world situation, they may be big files.

 
documents = ["This little kitty came to play when I was eating at a restaurant.",
             "Merley has the best squooshy kitten belly.",
             "Google Translate app is incredible.",
             "If you open 100 tab in google you get a smiley face.",
             "Best cat photo I've ever taken.",
             "Climbing ninja cat.",
             "Impressed with google map feedback.",
             "Key promoter extension for Google Chrome."]

Feature extraction

KMeans normally works with numbers only: we need to have numbers. To get numbers, we do a common step known as feature extraction.

The feature we’ll use is TF-IDF, a numerical statistic. This statistic uses term frequency and inverse document frequency. In short: we use statistics to get to numerical features. Because I’m lazy, We’ll use the existing implementation of the TF-IDF algorithm in sklearn.

The method TfidfVectorizer() implements the TF-IDF algorithm. Briefly, the method TfidfVectorizer converts a collection of raw documents to a matrix of TF-IDF features.

algorithm joke

Text clustering

After we have numerical features, we initialize the KMeans algorithm with K=2. If you want to determine K automatically, see the previous article. We’ll then print the top words per cluster.

Then we get to the cool part: we give a new document to the clustering algorithm and let it predict its class. In the code below I’ve done that twice.

 
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
from sklearn.metrics import adjusted_rand_score

documents = ["This little kitty came to play when I was eating at a restaurant.",
             "Merley has the best squooshy kitten belly.",
             "Google Translate app is incredible.",
             "If you open 100 tab in google you get a smiley face.",
             "Best cat photo I've ever taken.",
             "Climbing ninja cat.",
             "Impressed with google map feedback.",
             "Key promoter extension for Google Chrome."]

vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(stop_words='english')
X = vectorizer.fit_transform(documents)

true_k = 2
model = KMeans(n_clusters=true_k, init='k-means++', max_iter=100, n_init=1)
model.fit(X)

print("Top terms per cluster:")
order_centroids = model.cluster_centers_.argsort()[:, ::-1]
terms = vectorizer.get_feature_names()
for i in range(true_k):
    print("Cluster %d:" % i),
    for ind in order_centroids[i, :10]:
        print(' %s' % terms[ind]),
    print

print("\n")
print("Prediction")

Y = vectorizer.transform(["chrome browser to open."])
prediction = model.predict(Y)
print(prediction)

Y = vectorizer.transform(["My cat is hungry."])
prediction = model.predict(Y)
print(prediction)

If you are new to Machine Learning, I highly recommend this book

Download Machine Learning examples