What is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that focuses on building systems that learn—or improve performance—based on the data they consume.
Traditional Programming vs. Machine Learning
To understand ML, it's helpful to compare it to traditional programming.
Traditional Programming
In traditional programming, you provide the Rules (code) and the Data, and the computer gives you the Answers.
Machine Learning
In Machine Learning, you provide the Data and the Answers, and the computer discovers the Rules.
Once the rules (the model) are learned, you can apply them to new data to get predictions!
Why do we need Machine Learning?
Some problems are simply too complex to write explicit rules for. For example, how would you write a rule to predict if a Bigkart customer will buy strawberry ice cream or chocolate ice cream?
- "If they are younger than 12..." (Adults like strawberry too).
- "If they bought fruit yesterday..." (They might want chocolate today).
Instead of writing thousands of complex if/else statements, we simply feed the machine thousands of Bigkart purchase histories, and let it figure out the patterns and rules itself!
algorithms to cover