machine learning what is machine learning and why should you care about it"machine learning is field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed --arthur samuel the definition of machine learning coined by arthur samuel is often quoted and is genius in its broadnessbut it leaves you with the question of how the computer learns to achieve machine learningexperts develop general-purpose algorithms that can be used on large classes of learning problems when you want to solve specific task you only need to feed the algorithm more specific data in wayyou're programming by example in most cases computer will use data as its source of information and compare its output to desired output and then correct for it the more data or "experiencethe computer getsthe better it becomes at its designated joblike human does when machine learning is seen as processthe following definition is insightful"machine learning is the process by which computer can work more accurately as it collects and learns from the data it is given --mike roberts for exampleas user writes more text messages on phonethe phone learns more about the messagescommon vocabulary and can predict (autocompletetheir words faster and more accurately in the broader field of sciencemachine learning is subfield of artificial intelligence and is closely related to applied mathematics and statistics all this might sound bit abstractbut machine learning has many applications in everyday life applications for machine learning in data science regression and classification are of primary importance to data scientist to achieve these goalsone of the main tools data scientist uses is machine learning the uses for regression and automatic classification are wide rangingsuch as the following finding oil fieldsgold minesor archeological sites based on existing sites (classification and regressionfinding place names or persons in text (classificationidentifying people based on pictures or voice recordings (classificationrecognizing birds based on their whistle (classificationalthough the following paper is often cited as the source of this quoteit' not present in reprint of that paper the authors were unable to verify or find the exact source of this quote see arthur samuel"some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers,ibm journal of research and development no ( ): - mike roberts is the technical editor of this book thank youmike