Machine learning is pervasive in modern life, operating widely behind the scenes to automate complex tasks. This includes financial applications like scoring creditworthiness and detecting fraudulent transactions—which form the backbone of major e-commerce payment systems—as well as internet applications where it feeds search, recommendation, personalization, and ranking algorithms.

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A machine learning example, interchangeably referred to as a data point, sample, or instance, represents an individual record within a dataset. To be useful for learning algorithms, each example is characterized by a specific numerical representation, forming the basis for a model's predictions.

Machine Learning Example

A machine learning model is the computational machinery designed to ingest data of a specific type, apply mathematical transformations, and output predictions. In modern applications, the focus is on statistical models whose internal transformations can be estimated and refined using a dataset.

Machine Learning Model

Dive into Deep Learning

Optical character recognition (OCR) systems are a prominent, long-standing application of machine learning. Deployed since the 1990s for tasks such as automated mail sorting and reading bank checks, these systems drove early advancements in the field and led to the creation of the famous MNIST dataset of handwritten digits.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

In a machine learning dataset, a feature (also referred to as an input or covariate) is an individual, measurable attribute of a given data point. A model relies on these numerical representations to make its predictions.

Machine Learning Feature

Machine learning serves as a ubiquitous and transformative tool across various scientific and engineering disciplines. It drives significant modern advancements in fields like robotics, logistics, computational biology, particle physics, and astronomy by optimizing complex systems and accelerating research discovery.

Scientific Applications of Machine Learning

A deep learning model is a powerful type of machine learning model differentiated by its architecture, which consists of many successive transformations of data chained together from top to bottom. This depth of continuous data transformations allows these models to tackle complex tasks by automatically learning multi-level representations. By doing so, deep learning effectively replaces not only the labor-intensive process of manual feature engineering, but also the shallow models that are typically used at the end of traditional machine learning pipelines.

Deep Learning Model

A learned scoring rule can cause inference errors if it gives the correct answer a lower score than the model’s proposed answer. In that situation, the right fix is usually to improve the score-estimating model, not the search procedure.

Scoring Rule Problem

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a hypothetical, sentient artificial intelligence capable of reasoning about itself, improving its own architecture, and solving general tasks without human intervention. The textbook emphasizes that current AI systems are far from AGI; they are engineered, goal-oriented combinations of rules, heuristics, and statistical models that only give the illusion of general intelligence.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

When statistical machine learning models are applied without care, they can inadvertently learn and perpetuate biases, such as racial, gender, or age bias. If these automated systems are used to drive consequential decisions, such as assessing creditworthiness or granting bail, they raise significant concerns about procedural fairness and equity.

Algorithmic Bias in Machine Learning

The application of artificial intelligence has profound societal implications, particularly concerning employment. As machine learning automates routine and menial tasks, such as harvesting operations using farm robots, it reduces costs but also displaces jobs that provide significant employment. This automation phase is considered a much more pressing, realistic concern than hypothetical scenarios of malevolent superintelligence destroying humanity.

Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence

In machine learning, parametric models are algorithms that rely on a fixed, finite number of parameters to define their behavior. When these models are trained, updated, and saved, it is these specific parameters that are modified and written to disk. Because they possess a set number of parameters regardless of the dataset size, they typically contrast with nonparametric methods, whose complexity grows with the amount of available training data.

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