What is machine learning?

What is machine learning and how does it work?

Machine learning, a subset of AI, uses mathematical models to help computers learn from data without direct instruction. By using algorithms to identify patterns, machine learning creates data models that make predictions. Predictions improve as more data is collected and analyzed, much like how humans learn from experience. This adaptability makes machine learning ideal for scenarios with constantly changing data or tasks, where coding solutions would be impractical.

Key Takeaways

Machine learning, a subset of AI, allows computers to learn from data, identify patterns, and make predictions that improve over time.
Machine learning helps organizations uncover insights, improve data mining, enhance customer experiences, predict customer behavior, reduce risk, and lower costs.
Machine learning techniques include supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, transfer learning, and ensemble learning.
Various industries are using machine learning, including finance, healthcare, transportation, customer service, and agriculture.
The machine learning process involves collecting and preparing data, training the model, and interpreting the results.
When selecting a machine learning platform, look for features like cloud computing, accessible development environments, support for familiar machine learning frameworks, and enterprise-grade security.

How machine learning delivers ROI

Uncovers insights

Machine learning helps identify patterns or structures within structured and unstructured data through data analysis, uncovering actionable insights for decision-making. It also improves predictions and adapts to new data over time.

Improves data mining

Machine learning is excellent at data mining, which involves extracting useful information from large datasets. It takes this a step further by continuously improving its abilities over time, leading to more accurate insights and improved decision-making.

Enhances customer experiences

Adaptive interfaces, targeted content, chatbots, and voice-powered virtual assistants are all examples of how machine learning helps improve customer experiences. By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, machine learning personalizes interactions, provides timely and relevant information, and streamlines customer service.

Reduces risk

By continuously learning from new data, machine learning enhances its ability to detect and prevent fraud, providing robust protection against evolving threats. As fraud tactics evolve, machine learning adapts by detecting new patterns and preventing attempts before they succeed.

Anticipates customer behavior

Machine learning mines customer-related data to identify patterns and behaviors, helping sales teams optimize product recommendations and provide the best customer experiences possible. By continuously learning from new interactions, machine learning predicts future customer needs and preferences to support proactive and personalized engagement.

Reduces costs

Machine learning reduces costs by automating repetitive and time-consuming processes, allowing employees to focus on more strategic and higher-value tasks. Additionally, machine learning algorithms optimize resource allocation and minimize operational inefficiencies by analyzing large data sets and identifying areas for improvement. This leads to significant cost savings for businesses.

How machine learning learns from data and makes predictions or decisions

Supervised learning

Uses datasets with labels or structure, where data acts as a teacher and “trains” the machine learning model, increasing its ability to make a prediction or decision. The model learns by comparing its predictions to the actual outcomes and adjusting accordingly, improving accuracy over time.

Unsupervised learning

Uses datasets without any labels or structure, grouping data into clusters to find patterns and relationships. This technique helps uncover hidden structures in data, making it useful for tasks like customer segmentation and anomaly detection.

Semi-supervised learning

Combines both labeled and unlabeled data for training. This technique is particularly useful when labeling data is expensive or time-consuming. By using the unlabeled data, the machine learning model improves its learning efficiency and accuracy, making semi-supervised learning a practical technique for many real-world scenarios.

Reinforcement learning

Involves an agent—a computer program acting on behalf of someone or something—that replaces the human operator. The agent determines outcome based on a feedback loop, learning from feedback signals to improve its performance over time.

Deep learning

Uses neural networks with many layers, called deep neural networks, to model complex patterns in data. This subset of machine learning is particularly effective for speech and image recognition, and it excels at handling large amounts of data and solving complex problems in various domains.

Transfer learning

Is pretrained on one task and then fine-tuned on a related task. This technique is useful when there’s limited data for the new task. By using knowledge from the initial task, transfer learning significantly improves performance and reduces training time for the new task.

Ensemble learning

Combines multiple models to improve overall performance. By aggregating the predictions of several models, ensemble learning improves accuracy and robustness, outperforming any single model alone.

How machine learning works to solve problems

Here’s a step-by-step overview of the machine learning process.

Once data sources are identified, available data is compiled. The type of data helps inform which machine learning algorithms to use. As the data scientist reviews the data, anomalies are identified, structure is developed, and data integrity issues are resolved. Data preprocessing steps such as normalization, scaling, and encoding categorical variables are also performed to make sure the data is in a suitable format for modeling.
The prepared data is split into two groups—the training set and the test set. The training set makes up a large portion of the data and is used to tune the machine learning models to the highest accuracy.
When the data scientist is ready to select the final data model, the test set is used to evaluate performance and accuracy. Metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score are calculated to assess how well the model performs on unseen data.
Data scientists review the outcomes of machine learning models to extract insights, draw conclusions, and make predictions. They use various visualization tools and techniques, such as confusion matrices, to interpret and evaluate the model's performance.

Key features

What does machine learning do?

Predict values

Machine learning predicts values by identifying cause and effect between variables. Regression algorithms create a model from these values, which are then used to make predictions. Regression studies help forecast the future, such as anticipating product demand, predicting sales figures, or estimating campaign results.

Identify unusual occurrences

Often used to spot potential risks, anomaly detection algorithms pinpoint data outside the anticipated norm. Equipment malfunctions, structural defects, text errors, and instances of fraud are examples of how machine learning is used to address these concerns.

Find structure

Clustering algorithms reveal the underlying structure within the dataset, often serving as the first step in machine learning. By categorizing common items, clustering is widely used in market segmentation to inform pricing and predict customer preferences. Classification algorithms are used in supervised learning to assign predefined labels that accurately categorize information.

The role of machine learning engineers

Machine learning engineers transform raw data gathered from various data pipelines into scalable data science models. They connect structured data to the models defined by data scientists. They also develop algorithms and build programs that allow machines, computers, and robots to process data and identify patterns. This involves selecting and implementing appropriate algorithms, training and evaluating models, and fine-tuning hyperparameters to optimize performance.

In addition to these tasks, machine learning engineers preprocess data to make it suitable for modeling, deploy models into production environments, and continuously monitor and update them to maintain accuracy and effectiveness. By working closely with data scientists, they bridge the gap between data collection and actionable insights, making sure that machine learning solutions are both practical and impactful.

Machine learning algorithms

Machine learning algorithms identify patterns within data through data analysis. They help data scientists solve problems by predicting values, identifying unusual occurrences, determining structure, and creating categories. The choice of algorithm depends on the type of data and the desired outcome. Algorithms are generally classified by technique—supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement learning—or by function, such as classification, regression, and clustering. Selecting the right algorithm is essential for effective machine learning applications.

Learn more about machine learning algorithms.

Machine learning across industries

Businesses in various industries are using machine learning to enhance operations, improve decision-making, and drive innovation. Here are some key examples of how machine learning is applied across different sectors.

Banking and Finance

Risk management and fraud prevention are key areas where machine learning adds tremendous value in the finance industry.

Healthcare

Improving diagnostic tools, supporting real-time patient monitoring, and predicting disease outbreaks are a few examples of how machine learning helps improve patient care.

Transportation

Machine learning is transforming transportation by identifying traffic anomalies, optimizing delivery routes, and supporting self-driving vehicles.

Customer service

Answering questions, gauging customer intent, and providing virtual assistance are examples of how machine learning supports the customer service industry.

Retail

Machine learning helps retailers analyze buying patterns, optimize offers and pricing, and use data to improve the overall customer experience.

Agriculture

Machine learning improves agriculture by developing robots to address labor shortages, diagnosing plant diseases, and monitoring soil health.

What to look for in a machine learning platform

When choosing a machine learning platform, look for a solution that provides these business-critical features.

Cloud computing

With easy set up and deployment, the cloud is ideal for handling workloads of all sizes, allowing you to connect data sources and scale on demand—no advanced knowledge required.

Intuitive development environment

The ideal platform supports a range of skill levels.

Built-in support for familiar machine learning frameworks

Whether it’s Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), Python, PyTorch, scikit-learn, or TensorFlow, look for a platform that lets you work with the tools you know and love.

Enterprise-grade security

Choose a platform that provides enterprise-level governance, security, and control to safeguard your infrastructure.

Resources

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The four basics of machine learning are data collection, model training, model evaluation, and model deployment. Data collection involves gathering and preparing data for analysis. Model training uses this data to teach the algorithm to make predictions or decisions. Model evaluation assesses the model's performance using metrics like accuracy and precision. Finally, model deployment involves integrating the trained model into a production environment to make real-time predictions or decisions.
Regularization in machine learning is a technique used to prevent overfitting, which occurs when a model performs well on training data but poorly on new, unseen data. Common regularization methods include L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization, which add different types of penalties to the model's parameters. This helps improve the model's generalization to new data, leading to better performance in real-world applications.
It measures the proportion of actual positive instances that the model correctly identifies. In other words, recall answers the question: "Of all the positive cases, how many did the model correctly predict?"
An example of a machine learning model is a decision tree. A decision tree is a supervised learning algorithm used for classification and regression. It works by dividing the data into subsets according to the input feature values, forming a tree-like structure of decisions. Each node in the tree represents a feature, each branch represents a decision rule, and each leaf node represents an outcome.
Decision trees are straightforward and easy to understand, making them widely used for tasks like predicting customer behavior or diagnosing medical conditions
Machine learning is a subset of AI. In essence, AI encompasses a wide range of technologies and approaches, such as machine learning, natural language processing, and robotics. Machine learning is one of the key techniques used to achieve AI, allowing systems to automatically learn and adapt from experience, making AI applications more effective and intelligent.
Machine learning is a key technique in predictive analytics, which uses historical data to predict future events. It enhances this process by identifying patterns and relationships within the data, allowing for more accurate and scalable predictions. Machine learning models are trained on historical data to learn underlying patterns and can be applied to new data to predict outcomes. By continuously learning, these models improve their predictive accuracy, making predictive analytics more effective.
While machine learning encompasses a variety of algorithms and techniques for learning from data, deep learning specifically focuses on using these deep neural networks to achieve high performance in tasks like image and speech recognition. All deep learning is a subset of machine learning, but not all machine learning involves deep learning.