How Machines Learn (And You Win)

Mhine learning.” You’ve heard the term, and you probably nod in agreement when someone tells you how important it is. But secretly you may not be sure what it is or how it works. Ask your data scientists to explain, and you may get lost in a sea of specialist talk about forks, leaf nodes, split points, and recursions. Forget all that. The only thing you need to know is that machine learning applies statistical models to the data you have in order to make smart predictions about data you don’t have.

Those predictions can help you find signals in the noise and extract value from all the data you’re collecting. The advantage of—indeed, the imperative for—using machine learning is its speed and brute force. It can mine vast swaths of data in seconds or minutes, find patterns, and make predictions in ways that no human analyst could begin to emulate. Machine learning is, among other things, helping companies to detect that patients will have seizures long before they actually occur.

Best of all, no matter how much work you throw at it, the student never gets exhausted or bored. Here’s a look at how it works.

Source : How Machines Learn (And You Win)