What is Machine Learning? Machine Learning Basics

We all live in this world. This world has so many people and other species in it. And all of us have own ways of grasping things and building our wisdom or say intelligence. We tend to learn new things in order to keep our existence in this world. Humans learn through their experiences. Whatever experience humans gain, they apply this in their daily life. Let us talk about machine learning basics.

Humans have made a computer. Computers have eased our life. These learn from the instruction given to them. Whatever instruction we give, our computer works accordingly. For this, the computers have to be programmed by programmers.  It was the rise of artificial intelligence, when it was thought, what if computers too could learn through past experience.

But in terms of computers, the experience is data. So now, there was a need to teach computers about how to learn from the data. And so machine learning came into existence.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is basically an application of artificial intelligence. It aims at making the system or says, computers, capable of being trained from their past experience and hence, eliminating the need for programming them explicitly. Using this technology, we can develop computers that can access the data and can learn from it for further processing.

The learning method initiates the data and/or observation. These data can be past understanding, illustrations, or instruction. These are done for finding patterns hidden in the data. The data patterns are used for getting an improved understanding of the future operations and the instructions we feed. The major goal is to enable the computers to find out and learn robotically and not requiring the intervention or assistance of humans and perform accordingly.

Why Machine Learning?

Now we have discussed the definition of machine learning, let us talk about why it is needed.

• We need machine learning because, with the advancement in technology, the data in the world has increased in a good amount. This becomes a bit difficult to process each and every dataset manually. So, if computers are developed for doing this work, then this will be easy for us.
• Humans have the tendency of forgetting things very often. Also, we get bored easily when we are asked to do the same work again and again. But computers won’t feel bored.
• Image and voice recognition can be done with the help of this. You must have seen Facebook recognizes the people in our group pictures and then suggests our name accordingly. This is possible through machine learning only.
• Decision making and prediction are possible with the help of this. As the system will analyze and observe ever details, therefore decision making and predictions will be better.

These are machine learning applications as well.

Also Read: What is Blockchain Technology?

Machine Learning Algorithms:

After knowing the definition of machine learning, we must know the algorithms of machine learning. These algorithms of machine learning are very important for designing such machines and carrying out the work. The machine learning examples are broadly classified into these algorithms.

• Supervised learning:

It is the approach where after enough and appropriate training the model is ready for making the prediction and performing the calculation. In this algorithm, known sets of data or say labeled datasets are used for predicting the outcome.

We can understand supervised learning with the help of one real-world example. In Gmail, whenever we get any mail and if the mail is spam, then we just mark it as spam. Now whenever new emails will come to the Gmail will transfer similar emails in the spam box. This is done by the spam filtering technique.

• Unsupervised Learning:

This is the approach in which the system will work with the input data. But the data should be ordered and decipherable. This algorithm explores the input data for discovering out the patterns. Unsupervised learning is based on the fact of Observation. There is no predefined objective or outcome to predict. Finding the hidden pattern is the basis of unsupervised learning.

• Reinforcement Learning:

This machine learning approach is meant to have interaction with the environment and gain the best possible knowledge for producing a truthful business decision. Reinforcement learning has three phases. In this, the machine performs some actions and then gets the reward according to it.

Through this method, the software agents can easily conclude the best performance in a particular context. They can then make the most of the performance. When the action is good, the reward is best; and if the action is not worthy; the reward is bad.

This was all about the basics of machine learning.

Happy Reading!!!