Introduction to Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) [1-4] is a field of science that deals with learning patterns from data features and statistics, without explicit rule-based programming. ML provides an important capability for computers to learn from data examples and experience. A few simple machine learning examples include image classification [5, 6], spam email filtering [7], and stock price prediction [8]. For image classification such as dog vs. cat, an ML model is trained on thousands of images of dogs and cats until it can learn to distinguish the two. Similarly, for spam email filtering, an ML model can be trained with a lot of benign and spam emails to filter future spam messages.