How Does Machine Learns (Intro to Machine Learning)

Machine Learning is the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. — Arthur Samuel, 1959

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning is just 'Machine' 'Learning' which is quite straight forward i.e. when a machine which is learning it is called Machine Learning. But the main question is how does it learn?

Ill answer the above question in later section but before that let me tell you some uses of Machine Learning which will make it clear what machine learning is all about.

Example

Have you ever noticed how Netflix seems to know exactly what you want to watch? After finishing Minions, you might find a suggestion for Boss Baby popping up in your recommendations. Or maybe your little brother finished watching all the episodes of Peppa Pig which changed the recommendations. You hate it when someone messes with your recommendation section.

On the other side You might have used Gmail and received a mail from someone asking you to click the link to claim your 1 Million Dollars, only for it to end up in the spam folder. Did you ever think why was the mail that was sent to you ended up in the spam folder even though you wanted that 1 Million Dollars?

So, how does these system works?

In the case of Netflix recommendations, Netflix uses advance algorithms to analyze your watch history and track down which genre you like and recommends you movies/series based on that genre. Now you know why was Boss Baby recommended to you.

On the other hand email services like Gmail uses Classification Algorithms to determine whether a mail was a scam or not by analyzing the language and structure.

So, how do these machines Learns?

When you see a cat you can tell that 'its a cat' because you saw cats as you grew up either in videos or maybe you have a pet cat. The Machines are quite similar but they don't have many years to learn about cats so we give them a lots of cat images to learn so that it can understand what cat looks like and then given a new picture of a cat it can now understand that its a cat.

So we can say that A Machines learns by the data (which was cat images in the above example) its given and after learning through that data it predicts/provides an output based on the learning. The more the data the better the Machine Learns

A more technical definition would be :

Machine Learning is a field that is concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions.

Machine Learning can be of different types which ill be talking in another blog but here are the basic types.

1. Supervised Learning


2. Unsupervised Learning


3. Reinforcement Learning

Thanks for reading the blog see you guys in the next one.
If there is something you would like me to change or if I wrote something wrong be sure to notify me as it is my first blog and I am still learning about Machine Learning.