Definition

Machine learning: field of study taht gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

Arthur Samuel

In the 1950s Samuel wrote a program that would learn to play checkers by itself, and could eventually beat it’s creator (even though Samuel wasn’t very good at checkers.)

or…

Well-post Learning Problem: A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.

Tom Mitchell

So in checkers:

• E is the experience of playing checkers
• T is playing games of checkers
• P is the win/loss percentage

Types of ML

Supervised learning: teach the computer how to do something

Unsupervised learning: the computer learns by itself

Other Terms

• reinforcement learning
• recommender systems

This class will talk a lot about practical advice for applying learning algorithms. Huge different between people who have algorithm knowledge, but cannot apply them and those who know and can.