What is machine learning?

Machine learning is a branch of AI that gives computers the ability to learn new patterns with little to no human intervention. The machine learning models learn from previous computations to produce more accurate results as more data is crunched. A very simple example is Facebook's face detection algorithm, which uses machine learning techniques to identify the people in the pictures, and gets refined over time. Machine learning has its roots in computation statistics and has been referred to as data mining, although data mining focuses more on the unsupervised learning part of machine learning. To some people machine learning is still science fiction; however, it is now being used in everyday life from predicting fraud, to recommending new products and services to customers, and predicting when your car needs a service.

Is machine learning a new phenomenon? Almost 75 years ago in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, Warren S. Mculloch (http://bit...