Getting started with Machine Learning

From translation apps to autonomous vehicles, all powers with Machine Learning. It offers a way to
solve problems and answer complex questions. It is basically a process of training a piece of
software called an algorithm or model, to make useful predictions from data. This article discusses
the categories of machine learning problems, and terminologies used in the field of machine
learning.

Types of machine learning problems

There are various ways to classify machine learning problems. Here, we discuss the most obvious
ones.
1. On basis of the nature of the learning “signal” or “feedback” available to a learning system
 Supervised learning: The model or algorithm is presented with example inputs and
their desired outputs and then finds patterns and connections between the input and the
output. The goal is to learn a general rule that maps inputs to outputs. The training
process continues until the model achieves the desired level of accuracy on the training
data. Some real-life examples are:
 Image Classification: You train with images/labels. Then in the future, you
give a new image expecting that the computer will recognize the new
object.
 Market Prediction/Regression: You train the computer with historical
market data and ask the computer to predict the new price in the future.
 Unsupervised learning: No labels are given to the learning algorithm, leaving it on its
own to find structure in its input. It is used for clustering populations in different
groups. Unsupervised learning can be a goal in itself (discovering hidden patterns in
data).
 Clustering: You ask the computer to separate similar data into clusters, this
is essential in research and science.
 High-Dimension Visualization: Use the computer to help us visualize
high-dimension data.
 Generative Models: After a model captures the probability distribution of
your input data, it will be able to generate more data. This can be very
useful to make your classifier more robust.
A simple diagram that clears the concept of supervised and unsupervised learning is shown below:

As you can see clearly, the data in supervised learning is labelled, whereas data in unsupervised
learning is unlabelled.
 Semi-supervised learning: Problems where you have a large amount of input data and
only some of the data is labelled, are called semi-supervised learning problems. These
problems sit in between both supervised and unsupervised learning. For example, a
photo archive where only some of the images are labelled, (e.g. dog, cat, person) and
the majority are unlabelled.
  Reinforcement learning: A computer program interacts with a dynamic environment
in which it must perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle or playing a game
against an opponent). The program is provided feedback in terms of rewards and
punishments as it navigates its problem space.

2. Two most common use cases of Supervised learning are:

 Classification: Inputs are divided into two or more classes, and the learner must
produce a model that assigns unseen inputs to one or more (multi-label classification) of
these classes and predicts whether or not something belongs to a particular class. This is
typically tackled in a supervised way. Classification models can be categorized in two
groups: Binary classification and Multiclass Classification. Spam filtering is an
example of binary classification, where the inputs are email (or other) messages and the
classes are “spam” and “not spam”.
 Regression: It is also a supervised learning problem, that predicts a numeric value and
outputs are continuous rather than discrete. For example, predicting stock prices using
historical data.
An example of classification and regression on two different datasets is shown below:

3. Most common Unsupervised learning are:

 Clustering: Here, a set of inputs is to be divided into groups. Unlike in classification,
the groups are not known beforehand, making this typically an unsupervised task. As
you can see in the example below, the given dataset points have been divided into
groups identifiable by the colors red, green, and blue.
 Density estimation: The task is to find the distribution of inputs in some space.
 Dimensionality reduction: It simplifies inputs by mapping them into a lower-
dimensional space. Topic modelling is a related problem, where a program is given a
 list of human language documents and is tasked to find out which documents cover
similar topics.
On the basis of these machine learning tasks/problems, we have a number of algorithms that are
used to accomplish these tasks. Some commonly used machine learning algorithms are Linear
Regression, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, SVM (Support vector machines), Naive Bayes,
KNN (K nearest neighbours), K-Means, Random Forest, etc. Note: All these algorithms will be
covered in upcoming articles.
Terminologies of Machine Learning
 Model A model is a specific representation learned from data by applying some
machine learning algorithm. A model is also called a hypothesis.
 Feature A feature is an individual measurable property of our data. A set of numeric
features can be conveniently described by a feature vector. Feature vectors are fed as
input to the model. For example, in order to predict a fruit, there may be features like
colour, smell, taste, etc. Note: Choosing informative, discriminating and independent
features is a crucial step for effective algorithms. We generally employ a feature
extractor to extract the relevant features from the raw data.
 Target (Label) A target variable or label is the value to be predicted by our model. For
the fruit example discussed in the features section, the label with each set of input
would be the name of the fruit like apple, orange, banana, etc.
 Training The idea is to give a set of inputs(features) and its expected outputs(labels),
so after training, we will have a model (hypothesis) that will then map new data to one
of the categories trained on.
 Prediction Once our model is ready, it can be fed a set of inputs to which it will
provide a predicted output(label). But make sure if the machine performs well on
unseen data, then only we can say the machine performs well.
The figure shown below clears the above concepts:

Here are the steps to get started with machine learning:

1. Define the Problem: Identify the problem you want to solve and determine if machine
learning can be used to solve it.
2. Collect Data: Gather and clean the data that you will use to train your model. The
quality of your model will depend on the quality of your data.
3. Explore the Data: Use data visualization and statistical methods to understand the
structure and relationships within your data.
 4. Pre-process the Data: Prepare the data for modelling by normalizing, transforming,
and cleaning it as necessary.
5. Split the Data: Divide the data into training and test datasets to validate your model.
6. Choose a Model: Select a machine learning model that is appropriate for your problem
and the data you have collected.
7. Train the Model: Use the training data to train the model, adjusting its parameters to
fit the data as accurately as possible.
8. Evaluate the Model: Use the test data to evaluate the performance of the model and
determine its accuracy.
9. Fine-tune the Model: Based on the results of the evaluation, fine-tune the model by
adjusting its parameters and repeating the training process until the desired level of
accuracy is achieved.
10. Deploy the Model: Integrate the model into your application or system, making it
available for use by others.
11. Monitor the Model: Continuously monitor the performance of the model to ensure that
it continues to provide accurate results over time.
What is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning is the field of study that gives computers the capability to learn without being
explicitly programmed. ML is one of the most exciting technologies that one would have ever come
across. As it is evident from the name, it gives the computer that makes it more similar to humans: The
ability to learn. Machine learning is actively being used today, perhaps in many more places than one
would expect.
Features of Machine learning
1. Machine learning is data driven technology. Large amount of data generated by organizations
on daily bases. So, by notable relationships in data, organizations makes better decisions.
2. Machine can learn itself from past data and automatically improve.
3. From the given dataset it detects various patterns on data.
4. For the big organizations branding is important and it will become more easy to target relatable
customer base.
5. It is similar to data mining because it is also deals with the huge amount of data.