Machine Learning isn’t just one thing. It’s a whole field of things, like math or physics or whatever, that deals with creating computer programs that can “learn” from past data to better predict future data.
A basic example would be something like a (binary) classifier: a program that answers a yes-or-no question about a thing based on information about it. For example, a classifier might be trained on crime data to say someone is or isn’t worth the police looking into more, or might be trained on photos to decide whether a part in a factory is defective or not. Such a classifier might be trained on a past data set of lots of people’s data and past experience with whether they were or weren’t criminals, which “teaches” the classifier how to decide who is or isn’t a criminal.
The inputs and outputs of a machine learning model can be different depending on the type of model. A computer vision model, for example, might have a photo as an input and a list of things that appear in that photo as an output. A classifier might have a bunch of different types of data as inputs and a yes or no as an output. A neural net that has been trained to play Starcraft might have the current game state as an input and where it should click or what key it should press next as an output.
ML has applications anywhere that you have a bunch of data and want to build a machine to automatically make decisions from it. For cattle farming, for example, it might do things like detect potentially-diseased cows, decide how much feed to give the cow, or decide the best time to slaughter one for meat.
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