Machine Learning

Lesson 1: What is machine learning

1/1/Two definitions of Machine Learning are offered. Arthur Samuel described it as: "the field

of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed." This

is an older, informal definition.

1/2/Tom Mitchell provides 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 program will win the next game.

2/In general, any machine learning problem can be assigned to one of two broad

classifications:

Supervised learning and Unsupervised learning.

Lesson 2: Supervised Learning

Supervised Learning
1/In supervised learning, we are given a data set and already know what our correct output
should look like, having the idea that there is a relationship between the input and the output.

2/Supervised learning problems are categorized into "regression"(回归) and "classification"(分类) problems.
2/1/In a regression problem, we are trying to predict results within a continuous output, meaning
that we are trying to map input variables to some continuous function.                                                                                          2/2/In a classification problem, we are instead trying to predict results in a discrete output.

In other words, we are trying to map input variables into discrete categories.

3/1/Example 1:
Given data about the size of houses on the real estate market, try to predict their price. Price
as a function of size is a continuous output, so this is a regression problem.
We could turn this example into a classification problem by instead making our output about
whether the house "sells for more or less than the asking price." Here we are classifying the
houses based on price into two discrete categories.
3/2/Example 2:
(a) Regression - Given a picture of a person, we have to predict their age on the basis of the
given picture
(b) Classification - Given a patient with a tumor, we have to predict whether the tumor is
malignant or benign.