What is exactly Machine Learning?
Eliana Glasiuk
Senior Data Analyst | Business Intelligence Specialist | BI Consultant | Business Analyst | Economist | Data Scientist | Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst (PL-300)
Machine Learning is almost synonymous to Artificial Intelligence (AI) because it entails the study of how software can learn.
It is a sub- field of AI that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to “learn” from data, without being explicitly programmed.
It has seen a rapid explosion in growth in the last 5-10 years due to the combination of incredible breakthroughs in new algorithms such as Deep Learning, combined with almost exponential increases in CPU power, especially in parallel operations (GPU and TPU) which allowed for huge improvements in training Deep Learning networks.
What is explicit programming?
We said Machine learning allows software to learn without explicitly programming the information. But what do we mean by that exactly?
If I asked you to teach this robot or computer to know which customer is most likely to buy a football T-shirt, how would you do it?
You’d probably set up some predefined rules on finding the most likely customer. Something like males under 25. We would create some explicit rules to determine which customer will buy the football shirt.
领英推荐
Explicit programming is difficult
Now, imagine we had to program these rules into a computer system, and imagine we had access to a lot more information: ?
Past purchases creating an explicit rule-based system for each product will take extremely long, be prone to mistakes and generally not feasible.
WE NEED A BETTER SOLUTION!
Machine Learning involves using algorithms that can learn from data without any explicit programming by the user.
Imagine we had the customer profiles and their past purchase history. Using some machine Learning algorithm, we can feed this data to the computer and create a model that can tell us if a customer is likely to purchase a specific product!
Curious to learn more?
Read the complete article for deeper insights into the world of machine learning and discover how it can transform industries and everyday life.