Table of Contents • ← Learning ML • Chapter 1.01 - Help →
This book is for:
If that sounds like you, congratulations(!) you've come to the right place. If not, hopefully you still find this a valuable resource.
Well done for making it this far. If you've judged the book by its cover then hopefully you're indeed learning machine learning - so it's time to set some definitions. By using this resource, hopefully you'll be in a better position to explain machine learning and teach others (technical and non-technical people alike). To help with this, here's a handy definition:
Machine Learning is a set of computational methods which allow a computer (machine) to automatically find (learn) relationships within data.
Why is this useful? As the relationship are learned, they are collected into a model. A model is a simplified (but as we'll discover, not always simple) representation of the real world. Models (including machine learning models) are useful because, by generalising our understanding of the real world, they allow us to predict future events and discover structure that was previously unknown.
Machine learning has countless uses, and the list is ever growing. Some popular examples include:
As noted, machine learning is a set of computational methods, and this set can be primarily broken into two types: supervised machine learning and unsupervised machine learning.
Supervised machine learning is useful for prediction, and requires observations to have labels. An observation is a single record (or row) in the data, which represents some real-world object or event (such as a student, a loan, or a movie). A label is the data element you are trying to predict (such as dropped out, application status or box-office earnings).
Supervised methods are then further broken down into classification and regression. Classification uses labels with a discrete value (such as dropped out, which can either be True or False depending on whether that student completed their course or not, or application status, which could be one of accepted, declined or withdrawn). Regression uses labels with a continuous value (such as box-office earnings, a dollar amount - but equally could include any other number such as age or days between failures).
Unsupervised machine learning is useful for discovering structure, and does not require obvervations to have labels.
For this book, we are mainly concerned about supervised machine learning and how it is used for prediction, although as we will see, unsupervised methods can be very useful along the way.
There are many different software tools available that implement the methods described above. Some of these are graphical and some code-based. Some are free and open source, and others are absurdly expensive and enterprise licensed.
Two of the most popular tools for machine learning are the programming languages R and Python. Both languages are free and open source, and have strong support for machine learning with extensive package libraries and equally large communities. Other programming languages do have support for machine learning, and so the focus of this book is not to explicitly teach one particular language's machine learning implementations - but to teach the general usage of the methods agnosticly.
For this reason, code examples in this book include either R and Python code, and hopefully over time this will extend to other languages as necessary.