Overview of Machine Learning
To solve a problem on a computer, we need an algorithm. An algorithm is a sequence of instructions that should be carried out to transform the input to output. For example, one can devise an algorithm for sorting. The input is a set of numbers and the output is their ordered list. For the same task, there may be various algorithms and we may be interested in finding the most efficient one, requiring the least number of instructions or memory or both. For some tasks, however, we do not have an algorithm—for example,to tell spam emails from legitimate emails. We know what the input is:an email document that in the simplest case is a file of characters. We know what the output should be: a yes/no output indicating whether the message is spam or not. We do not know how to transform the input to the output. What can be considered spam changes in time and from individual to individual.We can easily compile thousands of example messages some of which we know to be spam and what we want is t...