What Is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning (ML) in simple terms can be defined as the science of getting computers to act and learn without explicit programming to perform those actions. It has become quite popular in recent years, however, the term itself was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel who defined Machine Learning as ‘the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly taught’.

A more recent and formal definition of Machine Learning was created by Tom Mitchell and describes it as a well-defined learning problem – ‘A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.’

Machine Learning usage has become so common that you probably use it many times a day without even knowing it. For example, when you search on Google or Bing or any other search engine, in the background there is a learning algorithm which has learned how to rank pages based on user queries. Similarly, when you see the photo detection feature on different social media applications or see spam filter filtering out bogus/unwanted emails in your mailbox, behind the scene is a Machine learning algorithm which learns and detect faces or spams emails respectively. A more recent technology use case is the advent of self-driving cars.

Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning Platform

Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning Platform for AI provides an all-in-one machine learning service featuring low user technical skills requirements, but with high performance results. On the Machine Learning Platform for AI, you can quickly establish and deploy machine learning experiments to achieve seamless integration between algorithms and your business. Machine Learning Platform for AI is built on the full-fledged algorithm application system of Alibaba Group, and is now serving tens of thousands of developers and enterprise users. You can quickly build services such as product recommendation, financial risk control, image identification, and voice recognition based on Machine Learning Platform for AI to implement artificial intelligence.