Machine Learning Quickies

 Following are some of the the applications of machine learning in various domains that I have come across : Advertising Advertising or advertisement forms one of the major business models in the world presently. Most of the modern day businesses, be it social media sites or writing apps, all earn and sustain themselves through advertising content to their users based on relevancy (or maybe not! ha-ha). As such, it is obvious that machine learning finds its use in this domain in multiple forms: Predicting click rate ML is used in predicting the number or percentage of viewers who will actually click on an ad displayed to them. Recommending appropriate ads  ML is used in recommending appropriate ads to users based on their interests and activity. Read recommendation engines to understand how it is actually done. Medicine and healthcare Medicine and healthcare forms one of the most important sectors of any place. As such whatever improves its quality needs to be invested in as s...

Now that you have dived deep into the waters of machine learning, you might be interested in knowing how to define it. But before you can define machine learning, you need to learn what "learning" is. So, what is "learning" in Machine Learning? Learning in ML and AI  How do human beings learn? They improve with their experiences. Right!. This is exactly what learning is. But how would you define it, then? Learning can be defined as the ability to improve with experience. In terms of AI and ML, it means making computer programs and systems which automatically improve with experience like human beings do. Experience can be thought of as "data". In ML, we try to build models which learn from data to perform some task like decision-making, prediction, etc. But this seems like an informal definition of ML. Right! How would you define it formally? Definition of ML The present standard definition of machine learning is given by Tom Mitchell, as follows:  A comput...

ML and AI: Benefits The first question that comes to mind whenever starting to learn something new is " Why ?". It is no different for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Why should you learn ML and AI? What are the benefits of learning ML and AI ? Is there any use to learning ML and AI? What do ML and AI offer that make them so special? Here I will try to answer these questions regarding the benefits of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Feel free to skip to the summary at the end if you need direct points. So, why should you learn ML and AI? Is it simply because they are popular and everybody's doing them, so you should also do them?  No.  So, what is the reason? Explanation ML is a subset of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the whole point is that you are trying to give computers human-like intelligence. Why do you want to do this? One reason could be curiosity and another is reducing human effort. Just think about it. If computers could ...

  AI explained in simple language: Remember, when you were a child and you saw some animal with paws. You did not know what it was and the adults told you it was a dog. Then, you saw some other animal and you called it a "dog" but the adults corrected you as it was a "cat". From then on, you started to differentiate between dogs and cats. This is what we call human intelligence i.e., the ability to learn over time from your environment.  Now, what if I told you a computer could also do what you did. Just like adults taught you, you could  teach a computer to differentiate between a dog and a cat. Would you call the computer "intelligent"? This is precisely what Artificial Intelligence (in short AI) is. It is giving computers human-like intelligence so that they could do the tasks traditionally reserved for humans. But why do we need AI? Because they are computers and can perform much more than a human could without getting tired. In fact, you are already u...