What's trending in Machine Learning?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a way to simulate human intelligence in machines. AI is like creating babies out of machines. Just like how you teach a baby to everything from scratch, you also have to teach machines everything from scratch. The only difference is that babies have brains which are responsible for processing all the information they absorb through their surroundings. But machines cannot do that. For machines, we have to create algorithms that can try to mimic the functionalities of the human brain. This is where Machine Learning (ML) comes into the picture. ML is one way to realize Artificial Intelligence.

Machine Learning as defined by Wikipedia is, “ Machine learning (ML) is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to perform a specific task without using explicit instructions, relying on patterns and inference instead. It is seen as a subset of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms build a mathematical model based on sample data, known as "training data", in order to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to perform the task.”

As it is evident from the definition, ML is about algorithms that are designed to carry out tasks like, analyzing high volume data, making predictions based on data, automating mundane tasks etc. There are various approaches to machine learning which are discussed next.