Machine Learning - something we have all heard of, but do we actually know what it means?
In the simplest words, Machine Learning is a different way of solving problems in which we feed authentic historical data into an algorithm which generates an ML model. We then use this model to predict outputs from any new data.
When computers didn't exist we used the traditional approach in which we collected inputs from different sources and manually wrote the instructions. Now however, programming languages such as Java and Python have helped convert these manual computations into simple code.
ML is now providing us with another way to solve problems in which we provide both inputs and corresponding outputs to ML algorithms which take the data and come up with a mathematical model which later on can be used to predict the outcomes.
The main difference between ML and Traditional Programming is that in Traditional Programming we write the program by ourselves given input parameters while in ML we use existing ML algorithms to generate mathematical ML models. We can adjust the algorithms based on the input and get a more optimised and effective model for our needs.
This blog is explaining the basics of Machine Learning and differentiating it from traditional programming. In subsequent blogs I will cover various approaches to solve problems through ML.
-Sarah âž¹