Introduction to Machine Learning

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 What Is 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 email. 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.

What we lack in knowledge, we make up for in data. We can easily compile thousands of example messages some of which we know to be spam and what we want is to “learn” what constitutes spam from them. In other words, we would like the computer (machine) to extract automatically the algorithm for this task. There is no need to learn to sort numbers, we already have algorithms for that; but there are many applications for which we do not have an algorithm but do have example data.

With advances in computer technology, we currently have the ability to store and process large amounts of data, as well as to access it from physically distant locations over a computer network. Most data acquisition devices are digital now and record reliable data. Think, for example, of a supermarket chain that has hundreds of stores all over a country selling thousands of goods to millions of customers. The point of sale terminals record the details of each transactions: date, customer identification code, goods bought and their amount, total money spent, and so forth. This typically amounts to gigabytes of data every day. What the supermarket chain wants it to be able to predict who are the likely customers for a product. Again, the algorithm for this is not evident; it changes in time and by geographic location. The stored data becomes useful only when it is analyzed and turned into information that we can make use of, for example, to make predictions.

We may not be able to identify the process completely, but we believe we can construct a good and useful approximation. That approximation may not explain everything, but may still be able to account for some part of the data. We believe that thought identifying the complete process may not be possible, we can still detect certain patterns or regularities. This is the niche of machine learning. Such patterns may help us understand the process, or we can use those patterns to make predictions: Assuming that the future, at least the near future, will not be much different from the past when the sample data was collected, the future predictions can also be expected to be right.

Application of machine learning methods to large databases is called data mining. The analogy is that a large volume of each and raw material is extracted from a mine, which when processed leads to a small amount of very precious material; similarly, in data mining, a large volume of data is processed to construct a simple model with valuable use, for example, having high predictive accuracy. Its application areas are abundant: In addition to retail, in finance banks analyze their past data to build models to use in credit applications, fraud detection, and the stock market.

1.2.5 Reinforcement Learning

In some applications, the output of the system is a sequence of action. In such a case, a single action is not important; what is important is the policy that is the sequence of correct actions to reach the goal. There is no such thing as the best action in any intermediate state; an action is good if it is part of a good policy. In such a case, the machine learning program should be able to assess the goodness of policies and learn from past good action sequences to be able to generate a policy. Such learning methods are called reinforcement learning algorithms.

Chapter 2 Supervised Learning

We discuss supervised learning starting from the simplest case, which is learning a class from its positive and negative examples. We generalize and discuss the case of multiple classes, then regression, where the outputs are continuous.

2.1 Learning a Class from Examples

Let us say we want to learn the class, C, of a “family car”. We have a set of examples of cars, and we have a group of people that we survey to whom we show these cars. The people look at the cars and label them; the cars that they believe are family cars are positive examples, and the other cars are negative examples. Class learning is finding a description that is shared by all positive examples. Class learning is finding a description that is shared by all positive examples and none of the negative examples. Doing this, we can make a prediction: Given a car that we have not seen before, by checking with the description learned, we will be able to say whether it is a family car or not. Or we can do knowledge extraction: This study may be sponsored by a car company, and the aim may be to understand what people expect from a family car.

Chapter 3 Bayesian Decision Theory

We discuss probability theory as the framework for making decisions under uncertainty. In classification, Bayes' rule is used to calculate the probabilities of the classes. We generalize to discuss how we can make rational decisions among multiple actions to minimize expected risk. We also discuss learning association rules from data.

3.1 Introduction

Programming computers to make inference from data is a cross between statistics and computer science, where statisticians provide the mathematical framework of making inference from data and computer scientists work on the efficient implementation of the inference methods.

Data comes from a process that is not completely known. This lack of knowledge is indicated by modeling the process as a random process. Maybe the process is actually deterministic, but because we do not have access to complete knowledge about it, we model it as random and use probability theory to analyze it. At this point, it may be a good idea to jump the appendix and review basic probability theory before continuing with this chapter.

Chapter 4 Parametric Methods

Having discussed how to make optimal decisions when the uncertainty is modeled using probabilities, we now see how we can estimate these probabilities from a given training set. We start with the parametric approach for classification and regression. We discuss the semiparametric and non parametric approaches in later chapters. We introduce bias/variance dilemma and model selection methods for trading off model complexity and empirical error.

4.1 Introduction

A statistic is any value that is calculated from a given sample. In statistical inference, we make a decision using the information provided by a sample.