Machine Learning for Engineering and Science Applications.

Professor Dr. Balaji Srinivasan.

Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Overview of Machine Learning.

We will be looking at an overview of machine learning algorithms. In the last video, we saw
a brief overview of the history of machine learning. Today we will be looking at a broad set
of ideas that play themselves again and again in machine learning.

(Refer Slide Time: 0:33)

So here are some common terms that you would encounter if you have just been new to
machine learning. One is the term of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a very
broad term, it simply means animator that tries to replicate the results of some aspect of
human cognition. The reason the word results is being emphasised, is because we might not
actually replicate the processes themselves but only the results. So, if somebody is playing
chess, somebody is driving car, all you want to do is to make sure that the final output is the
same, whether it is a machine or whether it is a human being.

As against this, machine learning is a specific term, that means programs that actually
perform better as your experience grows. What is meant by experience is something that we
will discuss a little bit later. At what it means is if you have, let us say Calculator, the
calculator is not getting better. You know, as you ask it to do multiplications again and again
and again, but if a human being is there, the person might actually get more accurate or faster
as they do multiplications for a while.
So, machine learning, if suppose to replicate this process which is as experience in a field
grows, whether it is spam detection, or whether it is vision or anything of that sort. Machine
learning if the set of algorithms which actually gets better. Artificial intelligence might or
might not actually get better with experience. You would have also heard the term neural
networks or artificial neural networks, there are type of machine learning algorithm.

And most commonly, you would have heard a term Deep Learning, which is a certain type of
artificial neural network. Nowadays it is being used in a broader sense, but more technically,
all it means is a neural network with a bunch of layers, which we will see later. Finally, you
would have heard the term Big Data, this is not a term that we will be using as far as this
course is concerned but simply it is a set of statistical techniques, which we also use within
Machine learning. The basic idea between, in big data, let us say often used very
commercially, is to find out an obvious pattern.

In Machine learning typically is to find out patterns which are obvious to human beings, but
might not be obvious to programs. Okay. But big data is typically try to find out patterns
which are not really obvious to human beings. So as far as this course is concerned, we will
be looking at primarily these 3, we are not looking at big data techniques or more general
artificial intelligence techniques.

(Refer Slide Time: 3:18)

So here is a kind of Venn diagram to show the relationship between various terms. This has
been kind of adapted from Goodfellow's book. So artificial intelligence as you can see is a
broad term, broad term that encompasses a lot of things, it also encompasses rules-based
learning, which I discussed in the last video. Machine learning is explicitly not rules-based,
which we will see a little bit later. And in deep learning is a particular subset of machine
learning itself.

(Refer Slide Time: 4:02)

So what is machine learning? If you are completely unfamiliar with the field, you might think
it looks something of this sort, this is obviously not true. Okay, it is not a machine which is
reading books or trading information and trying to learn something. A very simple definition,
which is from Gou is that it is simply using data to answer questions, more specifically an
actual machine learning algorithm looks more like this rather than this. It actually looks like
this, this is an algorithm called support vector machines, will be saying this later on some
way towards the middle of this course.

So, support vector machines or other machine learning algorithms work as follows. Machine
learning is simply a study of computer algorithms that actually improve automatically
through experience. So the term experience simply means lot of data, okay. A formal
definition, which is there in the textbook by Tom Mitchell, this textbook is called machine
learning. It is that suppose you have a task T, okay. And you have some experience E on it
and you have a performance measure P.

A standard example, task T could be let us say recognising spam. Okay, suppose you have
emails, you want to recognise whether the email is spam email or not. The experience E is the
data that you give, you give mails and label them spam or not spam. So this would be the
experience that you are giving this program. P is the performance measure, the performance
measure is how many or what fraction of emails are you labelling as spam. Okay.

(Refer Slide Time: 7:02)

So what this definition says is, as E increases, the performance should get better and better.
So any algorithm that achieves this is called a machine learning algorithm. So, here is a
machine learning paradigms, okay, so this idea is adapted from Pedro Domingo, he has got a
very good book. And actually multiple sources, he has a course online also, a book called
Master Algorithm, which is a popular kind of book. I would recommend that you read it.
Also Francois Chollet's Deep Learning with Python book have this idea.

So this is a classical programming thing. So you have certain rules and your certain data, it is
processed by the program and gives answers. For example if you have classical programming
approach to spam detection, you would have certain rules. For example if there are too many
caps or if the email talks about money and puts a dollar in the middle, something of that sort,
those would be the rule. Then the data would be the emails that you are giving it and once the
rules in the emails are given, it will give you some answers, spam or not spam, okay.

So the important thing here is these rules are fixed, that would be classical approach as
against a machine learning approach. Now machine learning approach is as follows. You give
the data which is still the same set of emails, you also give the answers which is, whether it is
spam or not spam, and it figures out the rules for itself. Okay. What is the rule that maps this
data to this answer. Okay, so this is the basic idea of machine learning which is you have to
find out a mapping between your input and your output. In this case the input is that it out the
emails and the output is the answers, whether it is spam or not spam.

In other cases you could have data like, you have an image, is this a cat, is this a dog, is this a
horse, those are the answer. So to show it thousands of images of cats, dogs and horses and
you label each one, this would be an example of what is called supervised learning. And then
it finds out what rule is it that we are implicitly using in order to figure out what a cat looks
like, what a dog looks like, what a horse looks like, etc., etc. So you can use this kind of
paradigm for practically everything, as you will see throughout this course.

(Refer Slide Time: 9:20)

So when is this kind of machine learning useful? It is not a generally a good idea to use
machine learning when you are actually very very clear about the rules. So this is some,
generally this is true, we will see some exceptions for this. One thing I will mention is,
typically a rule of thumb is do not use if the rules are very concise and clear. Okay, so there is
no ambiguity about what the rules are and you are not a victim of combinatorial explosion, in
such cases machine learning is probably not the best thing to go for.

However in cases where experts are not able to explain their expertise. For example, you
drive a car, how do you drive a car, it is not very easy to concisely explain it into a set of
finite rules, that this is how I am driving a car, this is how I recognise that something is spam
or not spam. It seems kind of obvious to us when we see our friend, whether this friend has a
cap on, different shirt on, we can immediately recognise that this is the same friend, that our
parent is so-and-so, even a child recognises this fairly quickly.
In such cases, when we are not able to explain our expertise, it usually means rules are
difficult to extract. The more obvious it is, the more difficult it is to extract the rules, okay.
And usually will have combinatorial explosion, that is that the problem gets more and more
complex, even for slight amount of increase of complexity, the number of rules you will have
to give are too many. In such cases, it is usually better to use a machine learning paradigm,
that is to simply say this is my input, this is my input, figure out the rules for yourself.

In certain other cases, even if you might note the rules, though the examples that I have used
here, even there navigation is a hard problem. Even for hazardous environments, it is usually
a good idea to use machine learning or any other artificial intelligence algorithm. Also when
you have solutions that need to be an adapted to very specific cases. For example if you want
a patient specific treatment for their particular, for their particular allergies, again the number
of rules that you will have to give will be too many.

(Refer Slide Time: 11:51)

So in such cases also machine learning can be quite useful, okay. So here is the fundamental
trick that is utilised in most of machine learning. Almost all of machine learning, this is, uses
this fundamental idea which is every problem that you have, whether it is a face recognition
problem, spam recognition problem, you know fluid mechanics problem, whatever it is, every
problem can be posed as a data problem. Okay. A data here means something involving
numbers. Okay.

And all solutions that we offer can be thought of as a function or a map, okay. So, here is the
problem, so for example let us say we are doing an image recognition problem, I will go back
to the same example. You have an image, he will not recognise whether it is a cat or a dog,
okay. So the problem is when we get sensory input, this is as qualia or basically we get
qualitative inputs. These are not numbers. So when you see a cat, almost invariably all you
see is a certain features of the cat, use the eyes, ears, nose, etc., you do not actually see
numbers.

However if you want to turn it into a data problem, you will actually have to somehow
change this from an image to numbers. Okay. So these images which we are getting as inputs
for our problems, these qualitative inputs have to be turned into numbers and after this
transformation, this is called an input vector. This is what goes into the program, okay. So
when I have the box and we have data coming in here, that was this. Those are the input
vectors that you are giving to the problem.

Similarly you have output that we give, so let us go back to the same example. If I see an
image I can call it a cat or I can call it a dog but cat and dog are words, these are not numbers.
You again have to turn these into numbers as well and these will be called output or target
vectors, okay. So they are the answers in the previous slide, these also have to be posed as
numbers. There is a slight difference between output and target vector. Output vector is what
the machine will give out, in the final case target vectors are what begins as examples in the
middle, we will see this later. Okay.

So, an essential part of the process of machine learning is to somehow decide on what are the
appropriate inputs and what are the appropriate outputs. This can also be easily turned into
numbers and with which you can train your algorithm. This is an essential part of the process.
Even the rules of the get out have to be finally posed in terms of formulae, programs or
numbers, okay. Now the learning task is to find a map that takes the input and gives out the
output. So this could be thought of as a function that takes in an input vector and gives out an
output vector. Okay, so this is a function or a map that does this.

So this is the fundamental trick that we will always use. Any problem you have, whether it is
a cognitive problem, any problem can always be turned into a problem which takes in a
bunch of numbers and gives out a bunch of numbers and what we want to find out is what
will map these input numbers into the output numbers. So this is the fundamental idea behind
most of the machine learning. Let us come to various types of learning problems.
(Refer Slide Time: 16:12)

Now, before I go into this, I want to point out that even though we have split into several
types of learning approaches, this has been done traditionally, not all of them have clear
boundaries. So you might find a case that goes into one type of learning approach or the other
type of learning approach, let us see a few. So, one of the most popular, even the examples
that I have used most commonly are what is called supervised learning. Supervised learning
is data which is labelled by human experts. You have somehow labelled this data and you
have set for this input, this is the output.

An example is something of this sort, let us say you have some log data points, each of these
data points could represent anything, please remember from the last slide, each point here
could represent a whole image because any image can also be turned into a vector, it can be
turned into a subset of numbers, okay. So let us say we have 3 types of data which you can
see, you have one set of crosses which are blue, one set of squares which are black and one
set of circles which are red.

And suppose somebody gives a new point, which is here or someone gives a point here and
you want to find out whether it is of type cross, type square or type circle? Okay, this is a
supervised learning problem. The spam-not spam example I gave you was also a supervised
learning problem because each example you gave, each email you gave you also
simultaneously said is this spam or not spam. So your dataset if it is labelled by an human
expert already and tells you example outputs, that is a supervised learning problem. Okay.
So some examples are labelling images, speech recognition, optical character recognition
which is to turn written stuffs by human beings into actually finding out whether this is you
know, is this S, P, etc, which is called optical character recognition. When you do
handwriting recognition, or printed material recognition out of images, that is a supervised
learning problem. So large parts of problem actually can be turned into supervised learning
problems. Another important category is what is known as a supervised learning. In this case,
the label for the data is not given.

So let us see the same data here, except the difference is that instead of giving Cross, square
and circle, I have not made any distinction between the data. Nonetheless, as human beings
we can automatically recognise that there are some clusters here. Then this might be one type
of vector, this might be another type of data, and this might be a 3rd type of data. In such
cases, supervision order labels are not given, nonetheless we are supposed to automatically
recognise the natural clusters that are forming, okay.

So such cases can be used in multiple applications, such as you know, you have, let us say
customers about 40 are purchasing in a certain way, customers believe 20 are purchasing in a
certain way but you do not know a priori that these are customers above 40 and these are
customers below 20, etc. But you see certain buying patterns, in such cases, you know the
data will naturally formed clusters and the machine is supposed to recognise automatically,
even though it seems obvious to us. At the machine is supposed to recognise through some
algorithm that this is one cluster that is another cluster.

So in such cases detecting new diseases, finding out something like credit card fraud, a
customer has been pertaining in a certain way for a long time and suddenly there is a change
in pattern of purchase, that would be an anomaly detection and that is a type of unsupervised
learning problem. There are some types of learning approaches which often lie at the
interface of supervised and unsupervised learning.
(Refer Slide Time: 19:55)

One set of problems that we will be looking at are what are called as generative approaches.
The idea behind the generate approach is to create a new data, that is somewhat like a given
set of data for the files Apple if I show you 100 images of cats, any human being can try at
least and draw in new cat which will not look like the 100 images that you already saw but it
will look somewhat different but it will at least extract key portions of a cat.

So such a learning approaches called a generative approach. This is neither labelling, nor
clustering what it is actually generating new data. Typically this is included within
unsupervised learning. We will be covering generative approaches towards the end of this
course and also during some sequence learning. There is another type of learning, this is
called semi-supervised learning, this is also quite possible, especially in medical images. You
have small amount of labelled data available, along with unlabelled data.

So you have let us say if you are MRI scans, and you have some let us say labelled tumours
etc. within that. But you also have a lot of other data where the expert has not been able to go
over the data. In such cases you kind of leveraged the labelled data and then use the amiable
data and start solving a full supervised learning problem and this is called semi-supervised
learning. There is also something called self supervised learning, where you actually do not
have any labelled data at all, but you can kind of figure out some implicit labels, okay, from
data using heuristics.

An example of this what was called auto encoders, which we will cover later on in the course.
Another example would be something like you have a few video frames and you want to
predict the next video frame. In such a case, you would kind of use self supervised learning,
okay. Finally, we have something called reinforcement learning, which is getting a lot of
traction nowadays. So, in such cases the easiest example for reinforcement learning would be
something again like chess or any video game that you play.

So you make a move and you know maybe 20-30 moves later you get to know and you get to
know only one thing, it even, did you lose or did you draw. But early on, 20-30 moves ago,
you do not know whether that particular move that you chose led you to win or led you to
lose. Okay. So you are trying to find out what action to take at a particular point based on
rewards that are really really far removed in time. Okay. So unlike, let us say simple
supervised learning, where I show you an image of a cat and say cat, here you are making a
move, you do not know whether the move is right or wrong, whether it led you to win, lose or
draw but you know the result of a combination of moves after a long time, okay.

So trying to learn under such an environment is called reinforcement learning, we will be

looking at a brief introduction to this also towards the end of the course. Now again I will
repeat the same point that I made earlier, which is the distinction between these various
classes is actually quite blurred quite often. We will mostly approach the course as if we are
doing neither supervised learning or unsupervised learning. So here are again according to
Guo some 7 steps in machine learning. This is not a hard and fast rule but this is a very good
abstraction of the whole machine learning process.

(Refer Slide Time: 23:39)

The first step of course is to decide on what data you want to use for the problem and then
gather the data. Often you will have to do other things, here you will have to clean the data
app, etc, etc, etc, which is the 2nd step. You also want to ensure that there is no inherent bias.
So, for example people doing an election polling. They want to make sure that they have not
taken one section or the other. Similarly when you are like, let us say data for whether a
person has cancer or not, you are likely to have something which is called class imbalance.

That is because if I randomly collect data from the population, 99.5 percent of the people are
bound not to have cancer. So even if I take random data and say this person does not have
cancer, I am going to be right 99.5 percent of the time. Because the amount of data that I have
for people with cancer is actually very very low. So when you prepare data, you want to
make sure that either the data is without bias or that you have sufficiently accounted for this
in your algorithm.

The 3rd part is choosing a model or algorithm. So we will be covering a large number of
algorithms through this course, okay. So some of those are written here random forest,
artificial neural networks, etc, etc. And so, choosing an algorithm is part of the problem, there
is no hard and fast simple rule for which algorithm works the best for which problem. This is
very much like modelling in engineering sciences, there is no always clear model that you
can use. Some models perform well in some domains and some perform well in some other
domains.

We are discussing details of several models and algorithms in this course so that you can
appropriately choose and find out. Of course choosing this is more of an art than a science,
okay. And then comes training, each model that you will have will have certain unknown
parameters which we will see in the rest of the course. For using data in order to determine
model parameters is known as training. And of course, after you do this, you then try and find
out, you test how did my particular model and particular set of parameters do.

And if it did not do well, you might have to tune a few things, hyper parameters we will come
to in the end. And after this whole process is over, this is the training process, training and
testing process, prediction is final deployment. So let us say out of all this he made an app
which does machine learning and it is a cat identifier. Final prediction is you deploy the app
and the customer uses it in order to deploy and check whether this person has a cat or not or
whether it is spam or not spam.
(Refer Slide Time: 26:35)

So the first set of algorithms we will be doing in the course will be supervised learning
algorithms. And typically in supervised learning it splits into 2, you either have classification
problem. Classification problem simply means you want to split the data into discrete
categories. So this could be category 1, this could be category 1 and this could be category 3.
So, all the persons, the end result that they want is to know what is this, is that A, B or C, this
is a cat, dog or a horse, is this email spam or not spam, such a problem is called a
classification problem.

This happens whenever you have discrete data. For example cancer, not cancer, benign
tumour, malignant tumour, etc. tumour classification, etc would be classification problems.
Another problem is a regression. Regression says it typically has real number data, has a
number of associated with it and you have an example of something happening in the past.
You could have house prices depending on their area, you could have for example the
example that is written on the slide, you could have previous stock prices and you want to
know what the stock price is going to be tomorrow.

Such problems are regression problems, they are not really speaking classification problems.
This is not good or bad but you actually want an actual number out of this one set of
numbers. These problems are known as regression problems.
(Refer Slide Time: 28:17)

So, some of the mathematical ideas that we will be using in this course are linear algebra.
Why do we need linear algebra? Remember that as I said earlier, machine learning involves
mapping. It involves mapping of what, from an input vector to an output vector. Now what
maps vectors to vectors? This is a series of matrices, okay. So if I take one vector and I have
to map to another vector of a different size, I have to use a matrix, okay. Which is why we are
going to look at linear algebra.

Again we will only cover very very rudimentary ideas, most of it should be already familiar
to you with linear algebra. Okay. Next is probability. So the reason we use probability is
whether it is the data that is given to us or the results that we see. You might see a person
from far and might not know whether this is quite your friend or not. A person identifying a
criminal from a line-up might not be 100 percent sure that this is exactly the criminal that
they want. Similarly the machine and need not be completely sure that this image is that of a
dog or cat or this tumour is cancerous or not cancerous.

So they have some amount of uncertainty built into them. So we account for this uncertainty
using probability theory. A very important component of machine learning is the idea of
conditional probability. So in case you do not know it, please do refresh it, we will be looking
at it through this course also but this is just a heads up for you, that conditional probability is
particularly important. The next idea that we will be looking at is that of optimisation.

The reason we require optimisation is that we have whole bunch of models within machine
learning and we want to find out which set of parameters is the best for a given model. Of
course when we come to optimisation, automatically you come to differentiation and you
come to multivariable calculus. So we will be looking at simple calculus, even though we
will not be covering calculus, we will be looking at multivariable ideas such as gradients, etc.
which are very important to find out optimisation.

Optimisation is really important because finally most machine learning models actually
reduced to just solving some optimisation problems or the other. In fact modern machine
learning theory is, extensively it uses optimisation theory.