Machine Learning

Chapter 1

Introduction to Machine Learning

1.1 Introduction

Learning is a very personalized phenomenon for us. Will Durant in his famous book, The Pleasures of Philosophy, wondered in the chapter titled “Is Man a Machine?” when he wrote such classical lines:

Here is a child; … See it raising itself for the first time, fearfully and bravely, to a vertical dignity; why should it long so to stand and walk? Why should it tremble with perpetual curiosity, with perilous and insatiable ambition, touching and tasting, watching and listening, manipulating and experimenting, observing and pondering, growing—till it weighs the earth and charts and measures the stars?… [1]

Nevertheless, learning is not limited to humans only. Even the simplest of species ...