Unsupervised Learning for Large Scale Data: The ATHLOS Project

Abstract

Recent technological advancements in various domains, such as the biomedical and health, offer a plethora of big data for analysis. Part of this data pool is the experimental studies that record various and several features for each instance. It creates datasets having very high dimensionality with mixed data types, with both numerical and categorical variables. On the other hand, unsupervised learning has shown to be able to assist in high-dimensional data, allowing the discovery of unknown patterns through clustering, visualization, dimensionality reduction, and in some cases, their combination. This work highlights unsupervised learning methodologies for large-scale, high-dimensional data, providing the potential of a unified framework that combines the knowledge retrieved from clustering and visualization. The main purpose is to uncover hidden patterns in a high-dimensional mixed dataset, which we achieve through our application in a complex, real-world dataset. The experimental analysis indicates the existence of notable information exposing the usefulness of the utilized methodological framework for similar high-dimensional and mixed, real-world applications.