What is Machine Learning ??
Tags: Sharing Knowledge, Machine Learning, First Post, Learning

Well my first post on the topic about Machine learning, hoping to contribute a lot to this big community

When I first heard about the term Machine Learning, I had no idea what it would be and how that is explained. But after about an year of learning I am now in a position to explain about this fascinating filed.

Now to the big Question what is Machine learning. Before diving into the answer, as usual we will get to see an example.

So, how do we learn things ? Any idea of back tracing about a thing you learnt, may be meaning of a word, how something works, learning a new language, all the leanings that we have come across. There can be many different ways we learn and how we learn that. But the things seems to be in common in all our learning will be an ‘example’ of what we learn

Imagine when you got to know being a kid you don’t know touching fire would harm you! How you knew that ? May be elders telling, and ultimately if you touch, your fingers started to feel that extreme burning sensation !

Now keep machines(computers) in place of you and real-world problems in place of fire, and imagine computers know what is what in due course of time, that is Machine learning !!

By definition “Machine learning (ML) is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to effectively perform a specific task without using explicit instructions, relying on patterns and inference instead. (wiki)”

In simple terms Computers learn by knowing the real data that we present to it. and being a computer once you learn you can perform well than an Human being in most stuffs. All the Internet world is filled with Machine Learning, right from your searches, suggestions, eCommerce sites, your video suggestions, self-driving cars, auto-tagging faces, image recognition and much more

So how do we teach Computers to learn things ? We as a human see and understand data. But computers can’t. That’s where Mathematics plays its role. We all know computers can out perform us well in almost all complex mathematical algorithms. Using these algorithms we will be able to teach them what is what and that is Machine learning

Seems confusing ?? No it won’t be. Let’s see an example Suppose say , in a class of 8th grade there are 20 students. We know all the data of them like Name, Age, Height, Weight and so on. And lets say a new student is coming in and we get all the data about that student except the Weight. Now the machine learning models can helps us predict that (of course not exactly) weight of the student by utilizing the other students data

Do you think it would tell correctly in all scenarios ? No !! Because it has only data of 20 students, and the new student could be over weight that the rest 20 students. The how could we predict accurately. That’s where the amount of data comes into play. If you can give more data say 100K students, then the chances that the model can give you accurate results will go up to 99% The data that we give in would be converted into some complex forms so that computers can interpret them and understand whet we are about to say

Jumping into the technical part, to create anything that computers should know, we need a programming language. Machine learning also has its own

Python

R

Matlab

SAS

Java

C++ and so on

What types are there in Machine Learning ?? Well in can go to many types. But at an high level we can say three

Supervise Learning : You would say these are my data, and then ask the computer to predict one feature amongst those for any unknown or new data(student weight example)

Unsupervised : Here we would be grouping things based on the relevance with similar things (video recommendations in YouTube, how will YouTube know that you may like a particular video, that’s because YouTube tracks people watching videos all over the world and at the back end, it groups users who watch similar videos, so that we can see those videos similar to others who have similar interest to us are seeing )

Reinforcement : The machine would be trained in such a way that it finds the best possible option of solving a problems, given scenarios where you solve and face hurdles (lot more)

Lot more on my next blog

Please comment out suggestions on this blog, so that I can learn more by sharing more