Chapter 6.  Machine Learning

We are the consumers of machine learning every day, whether we notice or not. E-mail providers such as Google automatically push some incoming mails into the Spam folder and online shopping sites such as Amazon or social networking sites such as Facebook jump in with unsolicited recommendations that are surprisingly useful. So, what enables these software products to reconnect long lost friends? These are just a few examples of machine learning in action.

Formally, machine learning is a part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which deals with a class of algorithms that can learn from data and make predictions. The techniques and underlying concepts are drawn from the field of statistics. Machine learning exists at the intersection of computer science and statistics and is considered one of the most important components of data science. It has been around for quite some time now, but its complexity has only increased with increase in data and scalability...