what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?
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The threshold for what is considered “machine learning” can be absurdly low. It’s basically any statistical model that can update itself based on training data. For example, I want you to predict someone’s gender if all you know about them is their height. Without any additional information, all you can really do is pick some cutoff and classify anyone above that height as a man and anyone below that height as women. But how do you choose the exact cutoff?
Say you have training data: the heights of 100 random men and the heights of 100 random women. You want to pick the cutoff value that maximizes the number of correct guesses, from this data set where are you already know the answers is in advance. Once you’ve written a program to do that, congratulations, you’ve just achieved machine learning!
Obviously, machine learning will be much more interesting if you have more variables in your statistical model, and then neural networks will be even more complicated and interesting.
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