i’m sure that if you are reading this article you must have heard about machine learning somewhere or the other and yes it is quite an intriguing topic this article will act as a supplement for the ones who know the basics of machine learning and are aware of where it is being used and how it is being used for the ones who are completely new to this you don’t have to worry we will be brushing up the basics as well so to start off with let’s have a look at the agenda first we’ll look into our life without machine learning then we’ll move into a life with machine learning then we’ll try to understand what is machine learning actually then we’ll look into the types of machine learning we’ll talk about the right machine learning solutions then we’ll move into the different algorithms that machine learning has.
let’s talk about a life without machine learning for someone who doesn’t know anything about machine learning or artificial intelligence he or she might think that it is only being used in robots or machines and stuff which is actually true as ported by most of the sci-fi movies nowadays but you wouldn’t believe how much more machine learning is giving us how much of it we are using in our daily lives let’s say you need information on any random topic say a computer the first place you would check would definitely be google right it would collect all the information on the word you search for and present it to you according to relevance if there was no google you would have to do it in a very hard way that is by going to tens or hundreds of books and articles even after which you won’t find the answer if we go back four to five years facial recognition would be a thing only showed in movies like mission impossible or terminator or any of the sci-fi movies you pick but machine learning has made it possible for facebook and instagram to use this feature for your benefits you don’t have to go through the trouble of tagging every single person present in a picture that you have posted facebook will automatically recognize the people in the photo and tag them for you that saves a lot of time for you doesn’t it also siri cortana iris all of them would not be there to help you if there was no machine learning now that we know life would be a lot more difficult without machine learning let’s look into the things that are run by machine learning and we are using them on our daily basis let’s enter the world of gaming pss and xboxes have introduced virtual reality glasses which brings a whole new level of detail into gaming every time your head moves in real world it replicates the movement in the virtual world providing an excellent gaming experience then there is gesture control gaming where in machine learning tracks your body movement and makes a corresponding movement in the game finally in the game fifa your opponent tends to adapt based on the kind of strategy or gameplay you follow that is again done by machine learning i’m sure you must have shopped a lot from amazon so let’s look into some of the places amazon makes use of machine learning let’s say you buy a formal t-shirt on amazon now as you buy it it suggests you formal shoes ties blazers and apparels that go with what you have bought that’s the recommendation system powered by machine learning again the price on every product that you see on amazon is varying every moment based on demand that’s being done by machine learning algorithms then comes customer segmentation customer segmentation is one of the most crucial thing for all the e-commerce platforms machine learning helps them differentiate between customers based on what they buy how frequent are they and their reviews this helps the companies to make sure that their customers are taken care of and the needs are being fulfilled now let’s talk about an app that you use on a daily basis to reach office on time yes it’s uber caps once you have traveled with uber you must have noticed that it suggests you the places you might want to go based on your previous journeys when you are taking a share how does the app make sure that the cab you get is traveled by the same route you want to travel in there are so many factors like the distance the traffic the ratings all of it is taken care of by machine learning for the past five Articles we have been talking about how machine learning is improving our lives where all it is being used i have probably said machine learning times already i think it’s about time that i tell you what machine learning actually is let’s take an ordinary system that you currently are using it can’t do much except from the basic operations that you already know about now let’s add artificial intelligence or for a layman’s point of view let’s give the same machine the power to think on its own that is what machine learning basically is it’s an application of artificial intelligence that provides systems the ability to learn on their own and improve from experience without being programmed externally so if your computer had machine learning may be able to play the difficult parts of a game for you or probably solve a complicated mathematical equation for you that could be really helpful let’s dive in a little deeper and see how machine learning works let’s say you provide a system with the input data that carries the photos of various kinds of fruits now you want the system to figure out what are the different fruits and group them accordingly so what the system does it analyzes the input data then it tries to find patterns patterns like shapes size and color based on these patterns the system will try to predict the different types of fruit and segregate them finally it keeps track of all such decisions it took in the process to make sure it’s learning the next time you ask the same system to predict and segregate the different types of fruits it won’t have to go through the entire process again that’s how machine learning works.
now let’s look into the types of machine learning machine learning is primarily of three types :
- first one is supervised machine learning as the name suggests you have to supervise your machine learning while you train it to work on its own it requires labeled training data.
- next up is unsupervised learning wherein there will be training data but it won’t be labeled.
- finally there’s reinforcement learning wherein the system learns on its own .
let’s talk about all these types in detail let’s try to understand how supervised learning works look at the pictures very very carefully the monitor depicts the model or the system that we are going to train this is how the training is done we provide a data set that contains pictures of a kind of a fruit say an apple then we provide another data set which lets the model know that these pictures were that of a fruit called apple this ends the training phase now what we will do is we provide a new set of data which only contains pictures of apple now here comes the fun part the system can actually tell you what fruit it is and it will remember this and apply this knowledge in future as well that’s how supervised learning works you are training the model to do a certain kind of an operation on its own this kind of a model is generally used into filtering spam mails from your email accounts as well yes surprise aren’t you.
so let’s move on to unsupervised learning now let’s say we have a data set which is cluttered in this case we have a collection of pictures of different fruits we feed this data to the model and the model analyzes the data to figure out patterns in it in the end it categorizes the photos into three types as you can see in the image based on their similarities so you provide the data to the system and let the system do the rest of the work simple isn’t it this kind of a model is used by flipkart to figure out the products that are well suited for you.
honestly speaking this is my favorite type of machine learning out of all the three .this type has been widely shown in most of the sci-fi movies lately let’s find out how it works imagine a newborn baby you put a burning candle in front of the baby the baby does not know that if it touches the flame its fingers might get burned so it does that anyway and gets hurt the next time you put that candle in front of the baby it will remember what happened the last time and would not repeat what it did that’s exactly how reinforcement learning works we provide the machine with a data set wherein we ask it to identify a particular kind of a fruit in this case an apple so what it does as a response it tells us that it’s a mango but as we all know it’s a completely wrong answer so as a feedback we tell the system that it’s wrong it’s not a mango it’s an apple what it does it learns from the feedback and keeps that in mind when the next time when we ask a same question it gives us the right answer it is able to tell us that it’s actually an apple that is a reinforced response so that’s how reinforcement learning works it learns from its mistakes and experiences this model is used in games like prince of persia or assassin’s creed or fifa wherein the level of difficulty increases as you get better with the games just to make it more clear for you.
let’s look at a comparison between supervised and unsupervised learning firstly the data involved in case of supervised learning is labeled as we mentioned in the examples previously we provide the system with a photo of an apple and let the system know that this is actually an apple that is called label data so the system learns from the label data and makes future predictions now unsupervised learning does not require any kind of label data because its work is to look for patterns in the input data and organize it the next point is that you get a feedback in case of supervised learning that is once you get the output the system tends to remember that and uses it for the next operation that does not happen for unsupervised learning and the last point is that supervised learning is mostly used to predict data whereas unsupervised learning is used to find out hidden patterns or structures in data i think this would have made a lot of things clear for you regarding supervised and unsupervised learning now let’s talk about a question that everyone needs to answer before building a machine learning model what kind of a machine learning solution should we use.
