Machine learning is a technique to teach programs that use data, to generate algorithms instead of explicitly programming an algorithm from scratch.

It is a field of computer science that originates from the research into artificial intelligence. It is closely associated to statistics and mathematical optimization, which give methods, theories, and application domains to the field. Machine learning is used in various computing tasks where programming explicitly rule-based algorithms is infeasible. Example applications include; e-mail spam filters, search engines, language translation, and computer visions. Machine learning can be sometimes confused with data mining, although it focuses mainly on exploratory data analysis.

Here are some of the terminologies that will be used in this chapter henceforth: