Machine learning is all about learning by example data; examples that produce a particular output for a given input. There are various business use cases for machine learning. Let us look at a few examples to get an idea of what exactly it is:
A recommendation engine that recommends users what they might be interested in buying
Customer segmentation (grouping customers who share similar characteristics) for marketing campaigns
Disease classification for cancer - malignant/benign
Predictive modeling, for example, sales forecasting, weather forecasting
Drawing business inferences, for example, understanding what effect will change the price of a product have on sales
The concept of statistical learning was existent even before the first computer system was introduced. In the nineteenth century, the least squares technique (now called linear regression) had already been developed. For classification problems, Fisher came up with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Around...