What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a branch of Artificial intelligence that focuses on the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to perform some specific task without using explicit instructions. They rely on patterns and inference to achieve that. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence.

Applications of Machine Learning

Machine Learning is used mainly in predictive Analytic and Business Intelligence. Some good examples of machine learning applications include:

1. Classification of whether an email is spam or not

2. Weather forecast

3. Fraud detection by banks

4. Betting predictions

5. Recommending products in website such as amazon, eBay, Walmart, Alibaba etc, friends recommendation in twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. among other areas.

How to start a Career in Machine Learning

If you decide to narrow down artificial intelligence to machine learning. There are many online resources that can take you to the next level. But before you enroll in any course, you must reflect on your learning style. That is, do you learn best with videos, books, or audio?

I will focus on useful resources for each type of learning method but let’s first break machine learning into its different sub-topics that will help you understand the most used machine learning algorithms that you can concentrate your efforts on. The objective here is to make sure that you don’t focus on irrelevant things. One thing you need to keep in mind is that the general field of Machine learning is best applicable if you have a lot of text and/or statistical data/numeric data about the problem you want to solve. The bigger the volume of data you have, the better the result you get in machine learning.