Post: What Is Machine Learning?

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a bigger point of conversation, it’s going to be increasingly important to understand some of the terms that surround the technology. Machine learning is a branch of AI that helps its tools better understand how to do their job. Image source: The Motley Fool What is machine learning?

Machine learning is the field behind a great many of the artificial intelligence programs that we encounter in daily life right now. It’s a method that AI tools use to acquire new information. Machine learning gives AI tools the ability to learn without being explicitly taught or programmed with new information, which makes all kinds of other things possible.

Not everything can be told to a computer in a program, which explains why machine learning was invented. It’s simple to teach a computer to calculate, but to teach it to paint a picture or write a cover letter takes a different skill set entirely, one that can look at examples and reassemble the parts into a new whole. How does machine learning train AI?

There are several machine learning protocols that programmers have developed that can teach AI tools how to do new things. Even though this cuts down on programming time, it often results in increased training time for the AI tools, which are taught by feeding them a massive amount of data about whatever it is they’re supposed to be specialists at doing, then testing them and providing feedback. Artificial intelligence uses machine learning to synthesize the data and the results during its training period.

For example, if you had an AI tool that used machine learning to pick stocks , you might feed it historical data on a particular stock or the entire market, let it analyze that data, and then proceed to ask it to show you when the markets were poised for a bull run. You would then correct it when it gave you the wrong answers until it only provided correct answers.

That AI could then theoretically be used to predict upcoming bull runs, but its accuracy would only be as good as […]

What Is Machine Learning?