What is machine learning?
ML is often seen as a sub-field of artificial intelligence. While this categorization is a subject of debate, ML has had lot of exposure in recent years due to its vast and visible field of applications, such as spam filters, natural language processing, and autonomous driving.
ML is a field where we build mathematical models from existing data so that the machine can understand this data by itself. The machine is "learning" in the sense that the developer doesn't have to program a step-by-step algorithm to solve the problem, which would be impossible for complex tasks. Once a model has been "trained" on existing data, it can be used to predict new data or understand new observations.
Consider the spam filter example: if we have a sufficiently large collection of emails manually labeled "spam" or "not spam," we can use ML techniques to build a model that can tell us if a new incoming email is spam or not.
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