In this chapter, we talked about machine learning at a high abstraction level: what it is, why it is important, and what kinds of problems it can solve. We learned that machine learning problems come in three flavors: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. We talked about the prominence of supervised learning, and that this field can be further divided into two subfields: classification and regression. Classification models allow us to categorize objects into known classes (such as animals into cats and dogs), whereas regression analysis can be used to predict continuous outcomes of target variables (such as the sales price of used cars).
We also learned how to set up a data science environment using the Python Anaconda distribution, how to get the latest code of this book from GitHub, and how to run code in a Jupyter Notebook.
With these tools in hand, we are now ready to start talking about machine learning in more detail. In the next chapter, we will look at the inner workings of machine learning systems and learn how to work with data in OpenCV with the help of common Pythonic tools such as NumPy and Matplotlib.