Chapter1

What is Machine Learning？

Two Definitions

1. Arthur Samuel(1959): Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. This definition is somwhat informal and older
2. Tom Mitchell(1998): 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.

Two most used types of machine learning algorithms

Supervised learning

Regression

	predict continuous valued output (price)

Classification

    discrete valued output (0 or 1)

Unsupervised learning

A clustering algorithm

An Unsupervised learning algorithm might decide that the data lives in two different clusters.

Examples:

• Organize computing clusters
• Social network analysis
• Market segmentation
• Astronomical data analysis

Cocktail party problem

//Cocktail party problem algorithm
//to separate two audio sources
[W,s,v] = svd((repmat(sum(x.*x,1),size(x,1),1).*x)*x');

It did take researchers a long time to come up with this line of code! BUT it turns out when you use the right pogrammming environment, many learning algorithms can be really short programs.

Octave or Matlab programming environment