6.390 - Intro to Machine Learning
The main focus of machine learning (ML) is making decisions or predictions based on data. There are a number of other fields with significant overlap in technique, but difference in focus: in economics and psychology, the goal is to discover underlying causal processes and in statistics it is to find a model that fits a data set well. In those fields, the end product is a model. In machine learning, we often fit models, but as a means to the end of making good predictions or decisions. This description is paraphrased from a post on 9/4/12 at andrewgelman.com. As ML methods have improved in their capability and scope, ML has become arguably the best way–measured in terms of speed, human engineering time, and robustness–to approach many applications. Great examples are face detection, speech recognition, and many kinds of language-processing tasks. Almost any application that involves understanding data or signals that come from the real world can be nicely addressed using machine learni