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Machine learning



 
 
Machine learning is the subfield of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
 that is concerned with the design and development of algorithm
Algorithm

In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects, an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing....
s that allow computer
Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates Data according to a list of Code .The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century , although the computer concept and various machines similar to computers existed earlier....
s to improve their performance over time based on data
DATA

Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa is a multinational Non-governmental organization founded in January 2002 in London by U2's Bono along with Robert Sargent Shriver III and activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign....
, such as from sensor
Sensor

A sensor is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument. For example, a mercury thermometer converts the measured temperature into expansion and contraction of a liquid which can be read on a calibrated glass tube....
 data or database
Database

A database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. The structure is achieved by organizing the data according to a database model....
s. A major focus of machine learning research is to automatically produce (induce) model
Model

A model is a pattern, plan, representation , or description designed to show the main object or workings of an object, system, or concept. Model may also refer to:...
s, such as rule
Rule

A rule is:* Rewrite rule, in generative grammar and computer science* Standardization, a formal and widely-accepted statement, fact, definition, or qualification...
s and pattern
Pattern

A pattern, from the French language patron, is a type of theme of recurring events of or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set....
s, from data. Hence, machine learning is closely related to fields such as data mining
Data mining

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data. As more data is gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information....
, statistics
Statistics

Statistics is a Mathematics pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It also provides tools for prediction and forecasting based on data....
, inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning

Induction or inductive reasoning, sometimes called inductive logic, is reasoning which takes us "beyond the confines of our current evidence or knowledge to conclusions about the unknown." The premises of an inductive logical argument support the conclusion but do not entailment it; i.e....
, pattern recognition
Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition is a sub-topic of machine learning. It is "the act of taking in raw data and taking an action based on the Category of the data"....
, and theoretical computer science
Theoretical computer science

Theoretical computer science is the collection of topics of computer science that focuses on the more abstract, logical and mathematical aspects of computing, such as the theory of computation, analysis of algorithms, and semantics of programming languages....
.

ications for machine learning include natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
, syntactic pattern recognition
Syntactic pattern recognition

Syntactic pattern recognition or structural pattern recognition is a form of pattern recognition, where items are presented pattern structures which can take into account more complex interrelationships between features than simple numerical feature vectors used in statistical classification....
, search engines, medical diagnosis
Diagnosis

Diagnosis is the identification of the nature of anything, either by process of elimination or other analytical methods. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines, with slightly different implementations on the application of logic and experience to determine the cause and effect relationships....
, bioinformatics
Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1978 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems....
, brain-machine interfaces and cheminformatics
Cheminformatics

Cheminformatics is the use of computer and Information science techniques, applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. These in silico techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies in the process of drug discovery....
, detecting credit card fraud
Credit card fraud

Credit card fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using a credit card or any similar payment mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction....
, stock market
Stock market

A stock market, or equity market, is a private or public Market system for the trade of Corporation stock and Derivative s of company stock at an agreed price; these are security listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately....
 analysis, classifying DNA sequence
DNA sequence

A DNA sequence or genetic sequence is a succession of letters representing the primary structure of a real or hypothetical DNA molecule or strand, with the capacity to carry information as described by the central dogma of molecular biology....
s, speech
Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to machine-readable input . The term "voice recognition" is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to speech recognition, when actually referring to speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said....
 and handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices....
, object recognition
Object recognition

Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale or even when they are translated or rotated....
 in computer vision
Computer vision

Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images....
, game playing
Strategy game

A strategy game is a game in which the players' decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Many games include this element to a greater or lesser degree, making demarcation difficult....
, software engineering
Software engineering

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches....
 and robot locomotion
Robot locomotion

Robot locomotion is the study of how to design robot appendages and control mechanisms to allow robots to move fluidly and efficiently. Although wheeled robots are typically quite energy efficient and simple to control, other forms of locomotion may be more appropriate for a number of reasons ....
.

machine learning systems attempt to eliminate the need for human intuition in data analysis, while others adopt a collaborative approach between human and machine.






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Encyclopedia


Machine learning is the subfield of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
 that is concerned with the design and development of algorithm
Algorithm

In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects, an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing....
s that allow computer
Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates Data according to a list of Code .The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century , although the computer concept and various machines similar to computers existed earlier....
s to improve their performance over time based on data
DATA

Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa is a multinational Non-governmental organization founded in January 2002 in London by U2's Bono along with Robert Sargent Shriver III and activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign....
, such as from sensor
Sensor

A sensor is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument. For example, a mercury thermometer converts the measured temperature into expansion and contraction of a liquid which can be read on a calibrated glass tube....
 data or database
Database

A database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. The structure is achieved by organizing the data according to a database model....
s. A major focus of machine learning research is to automatically produce (induce) model
Model

A model is a pattern, plan, representation , or description designed to show the main object or workings of an object, system, or concept. Model may also refer to:...
s, such as rule
Rule

A rule is:* Rewrite rule, in generative grammar and computer science* Standardization, a formal and widely-accepted statement, fact, definition, or qualification...
s and pattern
Pattern

A pattern, from the French language patron, is a type of theme of recurring events of or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set....
s, from data. Hence, machine learning is closely related to fields such as data mining
Data mining

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data. As more data is gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information....
, statistics
Statistics

Statistics is a Mathematics pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It also provides tools for prediction and forecasting based on data....
, inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning

Induction or inductive reasoning, sometimes called inductive logic, is reasoning which takes us "beyond the confines of our current evidence or knowledge to conclusions about the unknown." The premises of an inductive logical argument support the conclusion but do not entailment it; i.e....
, pattern recognition
Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition is a sub-topic of machine learning. It is "the act of taking in raw data and taking an action based on the Category of the data"....
, and theoretical computer science
Theoretical computer science

Theoretical computer science is the collection of topics of computer science that focuses on the more abstract, logical and mathematical aspects of computing, such as the theory of computation, analysis of algorithms, and semantics of programming languages....
.

Applications

Applications for machine learning include natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
, syntactic pattern recognition
Syntactic pattern recognition

Syntactic pattern recognition or structural pattern recognition is a form of pattern recognition, where items are presented pattern structures which can take into account more complex interrelationships between features than simple numerical feature vectors used in statistical classification....
, search engines, medical diagnosis
Diagnosis

Diagnosis is the identification of the nature of anything, either by process of elimination or other analytical methods. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines, with slightly different implementations on the application of logic and experience to determine the cause and effect relationships....
, bioinformatics
Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1978 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems....
, brain-machine interfaces and cheminformatics
Cheminformatics

Cheminformatics is the use of computer and Information science techniques, applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. These in silico techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies in the process of drug discovery....
, detecting credit card fraud
Credit card fraud

Credit card fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using a credit card or any similar payment mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction....
, stock market
Stock market

A stock market, or equity market, is a private or public Market system for the trade of Corporation stock and Derivative s of company stock at an agreed price; these are security listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately....
 analysis, classifying DNA sequence
DNA sequence

A DNA sequence or genetic sequence is a succession of letters representing the primary structure of a real or hypothetical DNA molecule or strand, with the capacity to carry information as described by the central dogma of molecular biology....
s, speech
Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to machine-readable input . The term "voice recognition" is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to speech recognition, when actually referring to speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said....
 and handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices....
, object recognition
Object recognition

Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale or even when they are translated or rotated....
 in computer vision
Computer vision

Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images....
, game playing
Strategy game

A strategy game is a game in which the players' decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Many games include this element to a greater or lesser degree, making demarcation difficult....
, software engineering
Software engineering

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches....
 and robot locomotion
Robot locomotion

Robot locomotion is the study of how to design robot appendages and control mechanisms to allow robots to move fluidly and efficiently. Although wheeled robots are typically quite energy efficient and simple to control, other forms of locomotion may be more appropriate for a number of reasons ....
.

Human interaction

Some machine learning systems attempt to eliminate the need for human intuition in data analysis, while others adopt a collaborative approach between human and machine. But human intuition cannot be entirely eliminated, since the system's designer must specify how the data is to be represented and what mechanisms will be used to search for a characterization of the data. Machine learning can be viewed as an attempt to automate parts of the scientific method
Scientific method

Scientific method refers to techniques for investigating phenomenon, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and Measure evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning....
.

Some statistical machine learning researchers create methods within the framework of Bayesian statistics.

Algorithm types

Machine learning algorithm
Algorithm

In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects, an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing....
s are organized into a taxonomy
Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word comes from the Greek language ', taxis and ', nomos .Taxonomies, or taxonomic schemes, are composed of taxonomic units known as taxa , or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure....
, based on the desired outcome of the algorithm. Common algorithm types include:

  • Supervised learning
    Supervised learning

    Supervised learning is a machine learning technique for learning a function from training data. The training set consist of pairs of input objects , and desired outputs....
     — in which the algorithm generates a function that maps inputs to desired outputs. One standard formulation of the supervised learning task is the classification
    Statistical classification

    Statistical classification is a procedure in which individual items are placed into groups based on quantitative information on one or more characteristics inherent in the items and based on a training set of previously labeled items....
     problem: the learner is required to learn (to approximate) the behavior of a function which maps a vector into one of several classes by looking at several input-output examples of the function.
  • Unsupervised learning
    Unsupervised learning

    In machine learning, unsupervised learning is a class of problems in which one seeks to determine how the data are organized. It is distinguished from supervised learning in that the learner is given only unlabeled examples....
     — An agent which models a set of inputs: labelled examples are not available.
  • Semi-supervised learning
    Semi-supervised learning

    In computer science, semi-supervised learning is a class of machine learning techniques that make use of both labeled and unlabeled data for training - typically a small amount of labeled data with a large amount of unlabeled data....
     — which combines both labeled and unlabeled examples to generate an appropriate function or classifier.
  • Reinforcement learning
    Reinforcement learning

    Inspired by related psychological theory, in computer science, reinforcement learning is a sub-area of machine learning concerned with how an agent ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of long-term reward....
     — in which the algorithm learns a policy of how to act given an observation of the world. Every action has some impact in the environment, and the environment provides feedback that guides the learning algorithm.
  • Transduction
    Transduction (machine learning)

    In logic, statistical inference, and supervised learning,transduction or transductive inference is reasoning fromobserved, specific cases to specific cases....
     — similar to supervised learning, but does not explicitly construct a function: instead, tries to predict new outputs based on training inputs, training outputs, and test inputs which are available while training.
  • Learning to learn — in which the algorithm learns its own inductive bias
    Inductive bias

    The inductive bias of a learning algorithm is the set of assumptions that the learner uses to predict outputs given inputs that it has not encountered ....
     based on previous experience.


Theory

The computational analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical computer science
Theoretical computer science

Theoretical computer science is the collection of topics of computer science that focuses on the more abstract, logical and mathematical aspects of computing, such as the theory of computation, analysis of algorithms, and semantics of programming languages....
 known as computational learning theory
Computational learning theory

In theoretical computer science, computational learning theory is a mathematical field related to the analysis of machine learning algorithms....
. Because training sets are finite and the future is uncertain, learning theory usually does not yield absolute guarantees of the performance of algorithms. Instead, probabilistic bounds on the performance are quite common.

In addition to performance bounds, computational learning theorists study the time complexity and feasibility of learning. In computational learning theory, a computation is considered feasible if it can be done in polynomial time. There are two kinds of time complexity results. Positive results show that a certain class of functions can be learned in polynomial time
Polynomial time

In computational complexity theory, polynomial time refers to the computation time of a problem where the run time, , is no greater than a polynomial function of the problem size, n....
. Negative results show that certain classes cannot be learned in polynomial time.

See also


Further reading

  • Ethem Alpaydin (2004) Introduction to Machine Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning), MIT Press, ISBN 0262012111
  • Christopher M. Bishop (2006) Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Springer ISBN 0-387-31073-8.
  • Ray Solomonoff, "" A privately circulated report from the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on AI.
  • Ray Solomonoff, An Inductive Inference Machine, IRE Convention Record, Section on Information Theory, Part 2, pp., 56-62, 1957.
  • Ryszard S. Michalski, Jaime G. Carbonell, Tom M. Mitchell (1983), Machine Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Approach, Tioga Publishing Company, ISBN 0-935382-05-4.
  • Ryszard S. Michalski, Jaime G. Carbonell, Tom M. Mitchell (1986), Machine Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Approach, Volume II, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 0-934613-00-1.
  • Yves Kodratoff, Ryszard S. Michalski (1990), Machine Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Approach, Volume III, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1-55860-119-8.
  • Ryszard S. Michalski, George Tecuci (1994), Machine Learning: A Multistrategy Approach, Volume IV, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1-55860-251-8.
  • Bhagat, P. M. (2005). Pattern Recognition in Industry, Elsevier. ISBN 0-08-044538-1.
  • Bishop, C. M. (1995). Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853864-2.
  • Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart, David G. Stork (2001) Pattern classification (2nd edition), Wiley, New York, ISBN 0-471-05669-3.
  • Huang T.-M., Kecman V., Kopriva I. (2006), , Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 260 pp. 96 illus., Hardcover, ISBN 3-540-31681-7.
  • KECMAN Vojislav (2001), , The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 608 pp., 268 illus., ISBN 0-262-11255-8.
  • MacKay, D. J. C. (2003). , Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64298-1.
  • Mitchell, T. (1997). Machine Learning, McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-042807-7.
  • Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank "Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques" Morgan Kaufmann ISBN 0-12-088407-0.
  • Sholom Weiss and Casimir Kulikowski (1991). Computer Systems That Learn, Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1-55860-065-5.
  • Mierswa, Ingo and Wurst, Michael and Klinkenberg, Ralf and Scholz, Martin and Euler, Timm: YALE: Rapid Prototyping for Complex Data Mining Tasks, in Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-06), 2006.
  • Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman (2001). , Springer. ISBN 0387952845.
  • Vladimir Vapnik (1998). Statistical Learning Theory. Wiley-Interscience, ISBN 0471030031.


External links