Eli5 What is machine learning?

Question

Like. What is it?

In: 8

Answer 1

It’s the approach of letting a computer learn how to solve a problem on its own instead of telling it how to do it.

You do this by proving a lot of input data and the correct output data. For instance, you give it 1000 pictures and tell it “this is a cat, this is a dog, another dog, another cat, etc”. Eventually, the computer will find patterns in the data, for instance that if there are whiskers in the picture then it’s a cat.