The capability of machine learning is actually the capability of adding new knowledge, or refining previous knowledge, that will help us in making the best or optimum decisions. Note the following, according to the economist and political scientist, Herbert Simon:
"Learning is any process by which a system improves performance from experience."
There is a standard definition that has been given by Tom Mitchell, who is a computer scientist and E. Fredkin University Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), that is as follows:
"A program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of task T and performance measure P. If its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience ...