Machine learning is a method of data analysis that uses algorithms to iteratively learn from data without being explicitly programmed. It allows computers to find hidden insights in data and become better at tasks via experience. Machine learning has many practical applications and is important due to growing data availability, cheaper and more powerful computation, and affordable storage. It is used in fields like finance, healthcare, marketing and transportation. The main approaches are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Each has real-world examples like loan prediction, market basket analysis, webpage classification, and marketing campaign optimization.