Machine Learning

Machine learning is a specialized area of statistics and artificial intelligence which focuses on identifying trends within data. Machine learning is often implemented with big data, where there may be millions or billions of data points or where each data point may be represented by hundreds or thousands of characteristics. In such situations, traditional statistical approaches may be limited by the extensive nature of the data. By making use of existing data, machine learning algorithms can update themselves over time so that the resulting models “learn” as more data are collected.

There are numerous machine learning algorithms, and the families of algorithms are often grouped together based on whether they are supervised or unsupervised algorithms. Supervised machine learning algorithms identify trends in the data and then ...