Machine Learning for Civil and Environmental Engineers

2 Introduction to Machine Learning

We are tellers of story.

Roland Blum (The Good Fight)

Synopsis

This chapter starts our journey into machine learning. We trace the modern¹ origins of this technology and outline some of its key milestones. This chapter sets the stage for defining most of the terminology we will be adopting in this textbook.² In parallel, this chapter will answer questions such as, what is machine learning? How does machine learning relate to artificial intelligence? What is some of the common procedure(s) to create and/or apply machine learning? How does machine learning differ from some of our traditional methods (i.e., experiments, analytical/numerical simulation, and statistical methods)? ³

2.1 A Brief History of Machine Learning

As this textbook is about machine learning (ML), let us start by defining what ML is before we visit its history. Machine learning⁴ creates specific types of computer programs⁵ that mimic the way humans learn to gradually improve their performance.⁶ Simply, a machine is trained⁷ on a task, and the more it learns about it, the more it becomes fluent and capable of accurately performing it. Recently, AI and ML have often been used interchangeably.⁸

As you might have noticed, the definitions of ML and AI do not mention algorithmic details or how these technologies practically relate to our domain. The same also infers that ML and AI are primarily and highly driven by data.

The first mention⁹ of the term AI as a tactic to resolve ...