7 Surprising Things About Machine Learning You’ll Love To Know

There’s been a lot of a fuss about machine learning over the past few years and it has become quite the ‘in thing’. So, what is it really all about? Well, machine learning involves creating systems and algorithms that have the ability to learn from the information and data they analyze and process. The algorithm gets better the more data it processes. Hence, the learning bit of it. It actually makes up a considerable part of Artificial Intelligence in general.

Herein below is the 7 surprising things.

1. It’s About Algorithms and Data, But Mostly Just Data

Plenty of excitement surrounds machine learning algorithms. But, the truth is, it’s all about the key ingredient, data! Without it, machine learning simply wouldn’t be possible. While sophisticated algorithms are something you can live without in machine learning, good data is something you can’t.

2. A Lot of the Tough Work Comes Time for Data Transformation

With all the hype surrounding this new technology one might think that it’s all about tuning and selecting algorithms. Well, it has a more prosaic reality to it. Most of one’s effort and time will be largely spent on feature engineering and data cleansing. That’s actually it.

3. The Data Used to Train It, is Basically What Determines How Good the Machine Learning Can Be

“Garbage in, Garbage out” is a phrase that predates machine learning. However, it has managed to accurately characterize one of machine learning’s key limitations. It can only understand the patterns and algorithms that are in the data you provided it during training. Tasks like classification will require robust collections of richly featured, correctly labeled data

4. Deep Learning May Just Be a Revolutionary Advance, However, It is Not a Magic Arrow

Deep learning is a technique that has been applied across a wide area of machine learning in general. It helps automate work that would’ve traditionally been designed to feature engineering. Especially for video data and image. However, that still doesn’t make it a silver arrow. It still can’t be used straight out of the box

5. Learning From Data is What Machine Learning Basically Means

All in all, it actually does live up to its hype. A large number of problems can be solved when the right learning algorithms have been provided with the right training data. Calling it AI helps sell it a little bit more is all. Guess it’s seen as a simpler explanation.

6. Stick to Simpler Models Unless a Lot of Data is Something You Have

Patterns in your data are what helps train machine learning models. It explores all the possible models guided by your parameters. Having too big of a parameter space will result in a training data overfed which translates to a model that’s unable to generalize beyond that data.

7. AI Won’t Rise Up and Plot to Bring Down Humanity

Stop letting science fiction movies and series dictate what you think about when you hear AI. They should only act to inspire your imagination. Don’t worry, robots are not about to rule the world anytime soon

And with that, we end our article on machine learning. Hopefully, you’ve learned a few new things you hadn’t known before. Machine learning generally has a rather exciting future. All you really have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride