Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition. Artificial Intelligence, often abbreviated as “AI”, may connote robotics or futuristic scenes, AI goes well beyond the automatons of science fiction, into the non-fiction of modern day advanced computer science.
Professor Pedro Domingos, a prominent researcher in this field, describes “five tribes” of machine learning, comprised of symbolists, with origins in logic and philosophy; connectionists, stemming from neuroscience; evolutionaries, relating to evolutionary biology; Bayesians, engaged with statistics and probability; and analogizers with origins in psychology. Recently, advances in the efficiency of statistical computation have led to Bayesians being successful at furthering the field in a number of areas, under the name “machine learning”. Similarly, advances in network computation have led to connectionists furthering a subfield under the name “deep learning”. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are both computer science fields derived from the discipline of Artificial Intelligence.
Broadly, these techniques are separated into “supervised” and “unsupervised” learning techniques, where “supervised” uses training data that includes the desired output, and “unsupervised” uses training data without the desired output.
AI becomes “smarter” and learns faster with more data, and every day, businesses are generating this fuel for running machine learning and deep learning solutions, whether collected and extracted from a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift, ground-truthed through the power of “the crowd” with Mechanical Turk, or dynamically mined through Kinesis Streams. Further, with the advent of IoT, sensor technology exponentially adds to the amount of data to be analyzed — data from sources and places and objects and events that have previously been nearly untouched.
Machine Learning is the name commonly applied to a number of Bayesian techniques used for pattern recognition and learning. At its core, machine learning is a collection of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions based on recorded data, optimize a given utility function under uncertainty, extract hidden structures from data and classify data into concise descriptions. Machine Learning is often deployed where explicit programing is too rigid or is impractical. Unlike regular computer code that is developed by software developers to try to generate a program code-specific output based on given input, machine learning uses data to generate statistical code (an ML model), that will output the “right result” based on a pattern recognized from previous examples of input (and output, in the case of supervised techniques). The accuracy of an ML model is based mainly on the quality and quantity of the historical data.
With the right data, an ML model can analyze high dimensional problems with billions of examples, to find the optimal function that can predict an outcome with a given input. ML models can usually provide statistical confidence on predictions, as well as on its overall performance. Such evaluation scores are important in the decision if you are to use an ML model or any individual prediction.
Implementing Machine Learning in your Organization