What is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence.
Arghhh!! Now what is Artificial Intelligence(AI)? Wiki says “AI is intelligence exhibited by machines”.
So Machine Intelligence is AI and Intelligence comes through learning - which means Machine Learning and so now we are in a loop.
To give a more subtle definition, AI is a branch of Computer Science concerned with making computers think like humans.
Human - a skillful mammal
Humans can reason unconsciously. Lets take an example of an art expert trying to identify whether a painting is fake or real. But when asked how he predicted it, many times the answer would be “I don’t know”, “Intuition”, etc.
Psychological studies have shown that when a mammal example a dog is trained with sufficient sample it can learn things from the sample. Example, say everyday before offering food to you dog you ring a bell, after a few days you will observer that dog expects you to serve him food whenever he hears a bell. There is mapping that the dog has created in his head which states that whenever my masters plans to serve me food he would ring a bell. In another words the dog has “learned” this activity.
Here we didn’t explicitly teach the dog that ringing of bell would imply food being available. What happened here is that the dog learned automatically from examples.
With Machine Learning we aspire to achieve something similar.
We aspire to build artifacts that learn over time provided an opportunity to learn. The learning in these artifacts is powered by algorithms - A fancy word for a mathematical recipe, where these algorithms are tasked to analyze the data and try to find a pattern in the data.
So Why is it so much talked about?
The fact that you wont need to explicitly code the patterns you observe in the data is fueling the talks around machine learning. An example could be learning behavior of a customer so that you can target him appropriately. Now doing this manually seems to be a practically impossible task even if you are a small sized company.
There are four broad areas in the which we can divided the field of Machine Learning
- Supervised Learning
- Unsupervised Learning
- Reinforcement Learning
- Deep Learning
We shall cover each of these section in detail in coming weeks.