Lecture #1

Machine Learning I
What is Learning?
What is Machine Learning?
 What Is Learning?
• Rat Bait Shyness
– Rats Learning to Avoid Poisonous Baits
 learning by memorization
• Suppose we would like to program a
machine that learns how to filter spam e-
mails.
– The machine will simply memorize all previous
e-mails that had been labeled as spam e-mails
by the human user. When a new e-mail arrives,
the machine will search for it in the set of
previous spam e-mails. If it matches one of
them, it will be trashed. Otherwise, it will be
moved to the user’s inbox folder
– it lacks an important aspect of learning systems
• the ability to label unseen e-mail messages.
 Generalization OR Inductive Reasoning
• recognising similarity between different situations.

• bait shyness example presented previously, after the rats encounter an

example of a certain type of food, they apply their attitude toward it on
new, unseen examples of food of similar smell and taste.

• spam filtering task, the learner can scan the previously seen
e-mails, and extract a set of words whose appearance in an e-mail
message is indicative of spam. Then, when a new e-mail arrives, the
machine can check whether one of the suspicious words appears in it, and
predict its label accordingly.

• However, inductive reasoning might lead us to false conclusions.

• Example: “offer” keyword in mail -- spam

 Inductive Bias
• The incorporation of prior knowledge that biases the learning
mechanism is referred to as inductive bias.
• For example mail from my organization with any keyword.
• The stronger the prior knowledge (or prior assumptions) that
one starts the learning process with, the easier it is to learn
from further examples.
• However, the stronger these prior assumptions are, the less
flexible the learning is – it is bound, a priori, by the
commitment to these assumptions.
When Do We Need Machine Learning?
• Two aspects that learn and improve on the basis of their “experience”: the
problem’s complexity and the need for adaptivity.
• Tasks That Are Too Complex to Program.
– Tasks Performed by Animals/Humans:
• driving, speech recognition, and image understanding.
• “learn from their experience”
– Tasks beyond Human Capabilities:
• analysis of very large and complex data sets: astronomical data, turning
medical archives into medical knowledge, weather prediction, analysis of genomic data, Web
search engines, and electronic commerce.
• Adaptivity.
– programs that decode handwritten text, where a fixed program can adapt to variations
between the handwriting of different users; spam detection programs, adapting
automatically to changes in the nature of spam e-mails; and speech recognition programs.
 Types of Learning
• Supervised, Unsupervised and Reinforcement
• Active vs. Passive Learners
• Online vs. Batch Learning Protocol
• Eager Learner vs. Weak Learner
 Active versus Passive Learners
– An active learner interacts with the environment
at training time, say, by posing queries or
performing experiments,
– while a passive learner only observes the
information provided by the environment (or the
teacher) without influencing or directing it.
– spam filter is usually passive
Online versus Batch Learning Protocol

• situations in which the learner has to respond online,

throughout the learning process.
• settings in which the learner has to engage the acquired
expertise only after having a chance to process large
amounts of data.
• a stockbroker has to make daily decisions, based on the
experience collected so far. He may become an expert over
time, but might have made costly mistakes in the process.
In contrast, in many data mining settings, the learner the
data miner has large amounts of training data to play with
before having to output conclusions.
 Weak Learner Vs Eager Learner
– time of convergence
– Week Learner: KNN
– Fast Learner: SVM
 Some successful applications of machine learning.

• Learning to recognize spoken words.

– All of the most successful speech recognition systems employ
machine learning in some form.
• For example, the SPHINX system (e.g., Lee 1989) learns speaker-specific
strategies for recognizing the primitive sounds (phonemes) and words from
the observed speech signal.
• Neural network learning methods (e.g., Waibel et al. 1989) and methods for
learning hidden Markov models(e.g., Lee 1989) are effective for automatically
customizing to, individual speakers, vocabularies, microphone characteristics,
background noise, etc.
• Learning to drive an autonomous vehicle.
– Machine learning methods have been used to train computer-
controlled vehicles to steer correctly when driving on a variety of road
types.
• For example, the ALVINN system (Pomerleau 1989) has used its learned
strategies to drive unassisted at 70 miles per hour for 90 miles on public
highways among other cars.
 Some successful applications of machine learning.

• Learning to classify new astronomical structures.

– Machine learning methods have been applied to a variety of
large databases to learn general regularities implicit in the data.
• For example, decision tree learning algorithms have been used by
NASA to learn how to classify celestial objects from the second
Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (Fayyad et al. 1995). This system is
now used to automatically classify all objects in the Sky Survey, which
consists of three terra bytes of image data.
• Learning to play world-class backgammon.
– The most successful computer programs for playing games such
as backgammon are based on machine learning algorithms.
• For example, the world's top computer program for backgammon, TD-
GAMMON(T esauro 1992, 1995). learned its strategy by playing over
one million practice games against itself. It now plays at a level
competitive with the human world champion.
 Some disciplines and examples of their influence on machine learning.
• Artificial intelligence
– Learning symbolic representations of concepts. Machine learning as a search problem. Learning as an approach to improving problem
solving. Using prior knowledge together with training data to guide learning.
• Bayesian methods
– Bayes' theorem as the basis for calculating probabilities of hypotheses. The naive Bayes classifier. Algorithms for estimating values of
unobserved variables.
• Computational complexity theory
– Theoretical bounds on the inherent complexity of different learning tasks, measured in terms of the computational effort, number of
training examples, number of mistakes, etc. required in order to learn.
• Control theory
– Procedures that learn to control processes in order to optimize predefined objectives and that learn to predict the next state of the
process they are controlling.
• Information theory
– Measures of entropy and information content. Minimum description length approaches to learning. Optimal codes and their relationship
to optimal training sequences for encoding a hypothesis.
• Philosophy
– Occam's razor, suggesting that the simplest hypothesis is the best. Analysis of the justification for generalizing beyond observed data.
• Psychology and neurobiology
– The power law of practice, which states that over a very broad range of learning problems, people's response time improves with
practice according to a power law. Neurobiological studies motivating artificial neural network models of learning.
• Statistics
– Characterization of errors (e.g., bias and variance) that occur when estimating the accuracy of a hypothesis based on a limited sample of
data. Confidence intervals, statistical tests.
 WELL-POSED LEARNING PROBLEMS
• Definition: A computer program is said to learn from experience E
with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if
its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with
experience E.
• In general, to have a well-defined learning problem, we must
identity these three features:
• the class of tasks,
• the measure of performance to be improved, and
• the source of experience.
• For Example
• A checkers learning problem:
– Task T: playing checkers
– Performance measure P: percent of games won against opponents
– Training experience E: playing practice games against itself
 WELL-POSED LEARNING PROBLEMS
• A handwriting recognition learning problem:
– Task T: recognizing and classifying handwritten words within
images
– Performance measure P: percent of words correctly classified
– Training experience E: a database of handwritten words with
given classifications
• A robot driving learning problem:
– Task T: driving on public four-lane highways using vision sensors
– Performance measure P: average distance travelled before an
error (as judged by human overseer)
– Training experience E: a sequence of images and steering
commands recorded while observing a human driver
Some Issues in Machine Learning
 Exercise
1. Explain the well posed learning problem for sentiment
analysis.
2. Explain the well posed learning problem for credit card fraud
detection.
3. Explain the well posed learning problem for fake news
detection.
4. Explain the well posed learning problem for stock price
pridction.