Overview
Machine Learning (ML) is a field of study in Artificial Intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance.
ML finds application in many fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, email filtering, agriculture, and medicine. When applied to business problems, it is known under the name predictive analytics. Although not all machine learning is statistically based, computational statistics is an important source of the fieldās methods.
The mathematical foundations of ML are provided by mathematical optimization (mathematical programming) methods. Data mining is a related (parallel) field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis (EDA) through unsupervised learning.
From a theoretical viewpoint, probably approximately correct (PAC) learning provides a framework for describing machine learning.