what is Machine Learning?

 Coursera lecture summary 

What is Machine Learning?

Two definitions of Machine Learning are offered.

Arthur Samuel described is as : "the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed." This is an older, indormal definition.

 

Tom Mitchell prviides a more modern definition: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."

 

Example: playing checkers.

E = the experience of playing many games of checkers.

T = the task of playing checkers.

P = the probability that the programm will win the next game.

 

In general, any machine learning problem can be assigned to one of two broad calssifications:

Supervised learning and Unsupervised learning.