Operators, product owners, and people affected by the unsupervised & retrieval decision.
Classical ML · weeks 8
Unsupervised learning, anomalies & retrieval
Novel equipment failures appear before reliable labels exist.
Opening production brief
A measurable problem, before a model.
PCA, explained variance, k-means, DBSCAN with version, owner, event time, and availability contracts.
Novel equipment failures appear before reliable labels exist. Every solution must state latency, cost, capacity, and fallback limits.
Offline evidence plus a deployable resolution: A PCA, clustering, anomaly, and nearest-neighbor retrieval investigation.
Frame and baseline
Turn the production problem into explicit data, metric, and baseline contracts.
- 01↗
PCA and representation geometry
PCA preserves dominant geometric variation, not automatically the information your decision needs.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 02↗
Clustering as an operational hypothesis
A cluster becomes knowledge only when stable geometry connects to a repeatable human or system action.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Build and stress
Formalize the machinery, test counterexamples, and expose system limits.
- 03↗
Density clusters and novel anomalies
Density methods flag what is locally disconnected; people and outcomes determine what is truly novel and important.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 04↗
Embeddings and similarity
Similarity is a modeling choice: the same vectors tell different stories under cosine and dot product.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Resolve and operate
Join model behavior to architecture, observability, rollout, and rollback.
- 05↗
Approximate retrieval under latency
Approximate retrieval is an explicit recall–latency contract, not a transparent substitute for exact search.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - HW↗
Incident discovery and retrieval system
Combine PCA, clustering, anomaly triage, embeddings, and ANN search with human review.
Rubric · staged hints · reference resolution
Prerequisite guidance
2 concepts make this faster.
Prerequisites are guidance, never hard gates.