Programming Machine Learning

Chapter 4Hyperspace!

In the previous two chapters, we predicted an output from an input: a restaurant’s pizza sales from its reservations. Most interesting real-world problems, however, have more than one input. Even something as simple as pizza sales isn’t likely to depend on reservations alone. For example, if there are many tourists in town, then the restaurant will probably sell more pizzas, even if it got as many reservations as yesterday.

If pizza sales have many variables, imagine how many variables we’ll have to consider once we get into complex domains, like recognizing pictures. A learning program that only supports one variable is never going to solve those hairy problems. If we ever want to tackle them, we’d better upgrade our program ...