you could say that data science is like broad inter-disciplinary field spanning across all the other fields which are sub-fields inside it of course this is just simple generalization and doesn' strictly indicate that it is inclusive of all other other fields as supersetbut rather borrows important concepts and methodologies from them the basic idea of data science is once again processesmethodologiesand techniques to extract information from data and domain knowledge this is big part of what we discuss in an upcoming section when we talk about data science in further details coming back to machine learningideas of pattern recognition and basic data mining methodologies like knowledge discovery of databases (kddcame into existence when relational databases were very prominent these areas focus more on the ability and technique to mine for information from large datasetssuch that you can get patternsknowledgeand insights of interest of coursekdd is whole process by itself that includes data acquisitionstoragewarehousingprocessingand analysis machine learning borrows concepts that are more concerned with the analysis phasealthough you do need to go through the other steps to reach to the final stage data mining is again interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary field and borrows concepts from computer sciencemathematicsand statistics the consequence of this is the fact that computational statistics form an important part of most machine learning algorithms and techniques artificial intelligence (aiis the superset consisting of machine learning as one of its specialized areas the basic idea of ai is the study and development of intelligence as exhibited by machines based on their perception of their environmentinput parameters and attributes and their response such that they can perform desired tasks based on expectations ai itself is truly massive field which is itself inter-disciplinary it draws on concepts from mathematicsstatisticscomputer sciencecognitive scienceslinguisticsneuroscienceand many more machine learning is more concerned with algorithms and techniques that can be used to understand databuild representationsand perform tasks such as predictions another major sub-field under ai related to machine learning is natural language processing (nlpwhich borrows concepts heavily from computational linguistics and computer science text analytics is prominent field today among analysts and data scientists to extractprocess and understand natural human language combine nlp with ai and machine learning and you get chatbotsmachine translatorsand virtual personal assistantswhich are indeed the future of innovation and technologycoming to deep learningit is subfield of machine learning itself which deals more with techniques related to representational learning such that it improves with more and more data by gaining more experience it follows layered and hierarchical approach such that it tries to represent the given input attributes and its current surroundingsusing nested layered hierarchy of concept representations such thateach complex layer is built from another layer of simpler concepts neural networks are something which is heavily utilized by deep learning and we will look into deep learning in bit more detail in future section and solve some real-world problems later on in this book computer science is pretty much the foundation for most of these domains dealing with studydevelopmentengineeringand programming of computers hence we won' be expanding too much on this but you should definitely remember the importance of computer science for machine learning to exist and be easily applied to solve real-world problems this should give you good idea about the broad landscape of the multi-disciplinary field of machine learning and how it is connected across multiple related and overlapping fields we will discuss some of these fields in more detail in upcoming sections and cover some basic concepts in each of these fields wherever necessary let' look at some core fundamentals of computer science in the following section computer science the field of computer science (cscan be defined as the study of the science of understanding computers this involves studyresearchdevelopmentengineeringand experimentation of areas dealing with understandingdesigningbuildingand using computers this also involves extensive design and development of algorithms and programs that can be used to make the computer perform computations and tasks as desired there are mainly two major areas or fields under computer scienceas follows