What is Machine Learning?
A lot of definitions about this subject and most of time people actually misinterpret about meaning of Machine Learning. In this post, we will understand what is Machine Learning in very basic terms or say, in layman term.
Arthur Samuel, firstly coined the term “Machine Learning”. He defined the term as:
“Field of study that gives computers the capability to learn without being explicitly programmed.”
Explained in layman terms, Machine learning simply means improving the process of learning for computers which is based on it’s experiences to do a certain task without further guidance through programs. In other words, we can say that machine learns through initial program and feeds itself the data which obtained from the experiences while executing a particular task.
Still did not get it? Alright, let’s take an example to understand this. A father and a baby went to a park to make the baby learn how to walk. Initially, the father hold the hands of his baby so that he/she can walk without tripping. Gradually, the baby can now stand on his/her own legs, thus the father need not hold hands of the baby, hence he/she kept going on and tripped as stone hit the toes. The baby stood up and learned not to walk over stones or can say, learned to avoid the stones. The next time baby faced the stones, he/she did not trip as learned previously.
Same is the case with machine learning, it gives feedback to itself and this helps train the model.
The model which we trained can perform more efficiently than humans as the rate of error is reduced to great extent. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can be proved very beneficial in the fields where accuracy and precision both are important. For instance, health industry, stock market prediction, etc.
There are some pre-requisites to learn ML:
1. Mathematical Skills:
- Linear Algebra
- Statistics
- Probability
- Calculus
- Graph Theory
2. Programming Skills:
- Python
- R Programming
- MATLAB
- C++
- Octave
That’s all for the brief of Machine Learning. I would like to end the post with a small ML joke:
Interviewer: “What can you say is your biggest strength?”
ML Expert: “I’m an expert in machine learning.”
Interviewer: What’s 6 + 10?
ML Expert: Zero.
Interviewer: That’s not even close! it’s 16!
ML Expert: Okay, it’s 16.
Interviewer: What’s 10 + 20?
ML Expert: It’s 16.
Hope it was worth reading.
Machine learning will automate jobs that most people thought could only be done by people.
— Dave Waters
Originally published at https://muskaanpirani.blogspot.com on June 20, 2020.
