Learning the ML basics

Before developing tinyML applications on ESP32, we will talk about some ML basics and terminology that will help us to better understand the examples of the chapter and ML concepts in general. As alluded to in the introduction, ML is not for all types of computing problems. We will discuss how ML differs from traditional programming and the types of ML approaches to solve different classes of problems. Then we will have an overview of the tinyML pipeline to understand the overall process of developing an ML application on a constraint device.

Let’s start with what ML is and what we can do with it.

ML approaches to solve computing problems

In traditional software development, we apply a set of rules (the program) to data (input) to get a result (output). Since we know the requirements, we write a specific program to generate a distinct output from data. We can see the flow in traditional programming in the following figure:

Figure...