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Mml-Book 6

The document introduces machine learning and discusses three key concepts: data, models, and learning. It explains that machine learning uses data to build models and optimizes these models to automatically find patterns in data through a learning process. The goal is to create general models that can extract useful information from various datasets.

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Ivan Marković
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67 views1 page

Mml-Book 6

The document introduces machine learning and discusses three key concepts: data, models, and learning. It explains that machine learning uses data to build models and optimizes these models to automatically find patterns in data through a learning process. The goal is to create general models that can extract useful information from various datasets.

Uploaded by

Ivan Marković
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1

Introduction and Motivation

Machine learning is about designing algorithms that automatically extract


valuable information from data. The emphasis here is on “automatic”, i.e.,
machine learning is concerned about general-purpose methodologies that
can be applied to many datasets, while producing something that is mean-
ingful. There are three concepts that are at the core of machine learning:
data, a model, and learning.

Since machine learning is inherently data driven, data is at the core data
of machine learning. The goal of machine learning is to design general-
purpose methodologies to extract valuable patterns from data, ideally
without much domain-specific expertise. For example, given a large corpus
of documents (e.g., books in many libraries), machine learning methods
can be used to automatically find relevant topics that are shared across
documents (Hoffman et al., 2010). To achieve this goal, we design mod-
els that are typically related to the process that generates data, similar to model
the dataset we are given. For example, in a regression setting, the model
would describe a function that maps inputs to real-valued outputs. To
paraphrase Mitchell (1997): A model is said to learn from data if its per-
formance on a given task improves after the data is taken into account.
The goal is to find good models that generalize well to yet unseen data,
which we may care about in the future. Learning can be understood as a learning
way to automatically find patterns and structure in data by optimizing the
parameters of the model.

While machine learning has seen many success stories, and software is
readily available to design and train rich and flexible machine learning
systems, we believe that the mathematical foundations of machine learn-
ing are important in order to understand fundamental principles upon
which more complicated machine learning systems are built. Understand-
ing these principles can facilitate creating new machine learning solutions,
understanding and debugging existing approaches, and learning about the
inherent assumptions and limitations of the methodologies we are work-
ing with.

11
This material is published by Cambridge University Press as Mathematics for Machine Learning by
Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, and Cheng Soon Ong (2020). This version is free to view
and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale, or use in derivative works.
©by M. P. Deisenroth, A. A. Faisal, and C. S. Ong, 2021. https://mml-book.com.

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