Introduction to Machine Learning

Abstract

We live in exciting times with smartphones and watches, smart clothes, robots, droids, face recognition, smart personal assistants, recommender systems, self-driving autonomous cars, and 24/7 service chatbots, all of which are artificial intelligence (AI). But what is intelligence? Intelligence might be defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, in other words, to learn and use the skills learned. Artificial intelligence is exactly that but done by computers and software. In real life, people would like to have intelligent machines that can do things people find boring, do inefficiently, or maybe cannot do at all. It could be an extension of human intelligence through using computers, which is artificial intelligence. The core of artificial intelligence is the ability to learn, acquire knowledge and skills, which is machine learning. In machine learning, the machine is learning, reasoning, and self-correcting. Arthur Samuel defined machine learning in 1959 as “a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed,” which defines machine learning very well.