eli5 How does machine learning work to predict human action/behaviour on social media?

Question

For example, how can it determine how likely I am to like use certain content/buy certain things (and is this different from algorithms?)?

In: 8

Answer 1

For online ads, survivorship bias might play a role in making the accuracy rate seem much better than it is. If you make note of all the ads presented to you on Reddit, you’ll find that almost none of them are for things that would ever be of interest to you, so you don’t notice those ads or forget them immediately. The ads that stand out and remain memorable are the tiny fraction that, possibly due to chance rather than algorithms, happen to be relevant to your interests.