Introduction - Machine Learning
Introduction - Machine Learning
Introduction
What is Learning?
Learning denotes changes in the system that are adaptive in the sense that they
enable the system to do the same task or tasks drawn from the same population
more effectively the next time. -- Simon, 1983
Operational definition:
Things learn when they change their behavior Does a slipper learn?
in a way that makes them perform better in
the future.
• Example:
• T: Cancer diagnosis
• E: A set of diagnosed cases
• P: Accuracy of diagnosis on new cases
• Z: Noisy measurements, occasionally misdiagnosed training cases
• M: A program that runs on a general purpose computer; the learner
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Defining a Learning Problem
Learning = improving with experience at some task
• improve over task T
• with respect to performance measure P
• based on experience E
Ex 1: Learn to play checkers
T: play checkers
P: % of games won
E: opportunity to play self
Ex 2: Sell more CDs
T: sell CDs
P: # of CDs sold
E: different locations/prices of CD
CS 8751 ML & KDD 8
What is Machine Learning ?
• A computer program M is said to learn from experience E with
respect to some class of tasks T and performance P, if its
performance as measured by P on tasks in T in an environment Z
improves with experience E.
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Kinds of Learning
• Based on the information available
• Association
• Supervised Learning
• Classification
• Regression
• Reinforcement Learning
• Unsupervised Learning
• Semi-supervised learning
Many approaches:
Regression,
Decision Trees,
Bayesian,
Neural Networks,
...
Regression computes
wi from data to
minimize squared
error to ‘fit’ the data
Not flexible enough
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Classification: Decision Trees
if X > 5 then blue
else if Y > 3 then blue
Y else if X > 2 then green
else blue
2 5 X
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Classification: Neural Nets
Can select more
complex regions
Can be more accurate
Also can overfit the
data – find patterns in
random noise
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Analysis/Prediction Problems
• What kind of direct mail customers buy?
• What products will/won’t customers buy?
• What changes will cause a customer to leave a bank?
• What are the characteristics of a gene?
• Does a picture contain an object (does a picture of space contain a
metereorite -- especially one heading towards us)?
• … Lots more