Introduction to Machine Learning with Python

Chapter 1. Introduction

Machine learning is about extracting knowledge from data. It is a research field at the intersection of statistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science and is also known as predictive analytics or statistical learning. The application of machine learning methods has in recent years become ubiquitous in everyday life. From automatic recommendations of which movies to watch, to what food to order or which products to buy, to personalized online radio and recognizing your friends in your photos, many modern websites and devices have machine learning algorithms at their core. When you look at a complex website like Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix, it is very likely that every part of the site contains multiple machine learning models.

Outside of commercial applications, machine learning has had a tremendous influence on the way data-driven research is done today. The tools introduced in this book have been applied to diverse scientific problems such as understanding stars, finding distant planets, discovering new particles, analyzing DNA sequences, and providing personalized cancer treatments.

Your application doesn’t need to be as large-scale or world-changing as these examples in order to benefit from machine learning, though. In this chapter, we will explain why machine learning has become so popular, and discuss what kind of problem can be solved using machine learning. Then, we will show you how to build your first machine learning model, introducing ...