MACHINE LEARNING: It Matters
Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves.
HOW ML IS DIFFERENT FROM AI?
Here are the key differences between:
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MACHINE LEARNING |
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |
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Machine learning is a subset of AI which allows a machine to automatically learn from past data without programming explicitly. |
Artificial intelligence is a technology which enables a machine to simulate human behavior. |
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The goal of ML is to allow machines to learn from data so that they can give accurate output. |
The goal of AI is to make a smart computer system like humans to solve complex problems. |
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In ML, we teach machines with data to perform a particular task and give an accurate result. |
In AI, we make intelligent systems to perform any task like a human. |
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Machine learning is working to create machines that can perform only those specific tasks for which they are trained. |
AI is working to create an intelligent system which can perform various complex tasks. |
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The main applications of machine learning are Online recommender system, Google search algorithms, Facebook auto friend tagging suggestions, etc. |
The main applications of AI are Siri, customer support using catboats, Expert System, Online game playing, intelligent humanoid robot, etc. |
WHY MACHINE LEARNING MATTERS?
With the rise in big data, machine learning has become a key technique for solving problems in areas, such as:
- Computational finance, for credit scoring and algorithmic trading.
- Image processing and computer vision, for face recognition, motion detection, and object detection.
- Computational biology, for tumor detection, drug discovery, and DNA sequencing.
- Energy production, for price and load forecasting.
- Automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing, for predictive maintenance.
- Natural language processing, for voice recognition applications.
WHAT ARE THE METHODS OR TYPES OF ML?
Broadly there are three types of ML Algorithms:
- Supervised Learning
- Unsupervised Learning
- Reinforcement Learning
Let’s just study about these methods in detail-
1. Supervised Learning - It builds a model that makes predictions based on evidence in the presence of uncertainty. A supervised learning algorithm takes a known set of input data and known responses to the data (output) and trains a model to generate reasonable predictions for the response to new data. Use supervised learning if you have known data for the output you are trying to predict.
Supervised learning uses classification and regression techniques.
Classification techniques predict discrete responses—for example, whether an email is genuine or spam, or whether a tumor is cancerous or benign. Classification models classify input data into categories. Typical applications include medical imaging, speech recognition, and credit scoring.
Regression techniques predict continuous responses—for example, changes in temperature or fluctuations in power demand. Typical applications include electricity load forecasting and algorithmic trading.
2. Unsupervised Learning – It finds hidden patterns or intrinsic structures in data. It is used to draw inferences from datasets consisting of input data without labeled responses.
Unsupervised learning uses clustering and association techniques.
Clustering is the most common unsupervised learning technique. It is used for exploratory data analysis to find hidden patterns or groupings in data. Applications for cluster analysis include gene sequence analysis, market research, and object recognition.
Association is a rule based ML technique which finds out some very useful relations between parameters of a large data set. For e.g. shopping stores use algorithms based on this technique to find out relationship between sale of one product w.r.t to others sale based on customer behavior.
3. Reinforcement Learning - It is a learning method that interacts with its environment by producing actions and discovers errors or rewards. Trial and error search and delayed reward are the most relevant characteristics of reinforcement learning. This method allows machines and software agents to automatically determine the ideal behavior within a specific context in order to maximize its performance. Simple reward feedback is required for the agent to learn which action is best; this is known as the reinforcement signal.
WHY MACHINE LEARNING IS SO SUCCESSFUL?
This resurgence comes on the back of a series of breakthroughs, with deep learning setting new records for accuracy in areas such as speech and language recognition, and computer vision.
But what made these successes possible are primarily two factors, one being the vast quantities of images, speech, video and text that is accessible to researchers looking to train machine-learning systems.
But even more important is the availability of vast amounts of parallel-processing power, courtesy of modern graphics processing units (GPUs), which can be linked together into clusters to form machine-learning powerhouses.
Today anyone with an internet connection can use these clusters to train machine-learning models, via cloud services provided by firms like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
As the use of machine-learning has taken off, so companies are now creating specialized hardware tailored to running and training machine-learning models. An example of one of these custom chips is Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), the latest version of which accelerates the rate at which machine-learning models built using Google's TensorFlow software library can infer information from data, as well as the rate at which they can be trained.
As hardware becomes increasingly specialized and machine learning software frameworks are refined, it's becoming increasingly common for ML tasks to be carried out on consumer grade phones and computers, rather than in cloud datacenters.
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