What is machine learning ?

Machine learning is the subset of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on algorithms that can
“learn” the patterns of training data and, subsequently, make accurate inferences about new data.
This pattern recognition ability enables machine learning models to make decisions or
predictions without explicit, hard-coded instructions.

Machine learning has come to dominate the field of AI: it provides the backbone of most modern
AI systems, from forecasting models to autonomous vehicles to large language models
(LLMs) and other generative AI tools.

The central premise of machine learning (ML) is that if you optimize a model’s performance on
a dataset of tasks that adequately resemble the real-world problems it will be used for—through a
process called model training—the model can make accurate predictions on the new data it sees
in its ultimate use case.

Training itself is simply a means to an end: generalization, the translation of strong performance
on training data to useful results in real-world scenarios, is the fundamental goal of machine
learning. In essence, a trained model is applying patterns it learned from training data to infer the
correct output for a real-world task: the deployment of an AI model is therefore called AI
inference.

Deep learning, the subset of machine learning driven by large—or rather, “deep”—artificial
neural networks, has emerged over the past few decades as the state-of-the-art AI model
architecture across nearly every domain in which AI is used. In contrast to the explicitly defined
algorithms of traditional machine learning, deep learning relies on distributed “networks” of
mathematical operations that provide an unparalleled ability to learn the intricate nuances of very
complex data. Because deep learning requires very large amounts of data and computational
resources, its advent has coincided with the escalated importance “big data” and graphics
processing units (GPUs).

The discipline of machine learning is closely intertwined with that of data science. In a sense,
machine learning can be understood as a collection of algorithms and techniques to automate
data analysis and (more importantly) apply learnings from that analysis to the autonomous
execution of relevant tasks.

The origin of the term (albeit not the core concept itself) is often attributed to Arthur L. Samuel’s
1959 article in IBM Journal, “Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers.”
In the paper’s introduction, Samuel neatly articulates machine learning’s ideal outcome: “a
computer can be programmed so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be
played by the person who wrote the program.”1

Machine learning vs. artificial intelligence

Though “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” are often used interchangeably, they are
not quite synonymous. In short: all machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning.
In the popular imagination, “AI” is usually associated with science fiction—typically through
depictions of what’s more properly called artificial general intelligence (AGI), like HAL 9000
in Space Odyssey or Ava in Ex Machina—or, more recently, with generative AI. But “artificial
intelligence” is a catch-all term for any program that can use information to make decisions or
predictions without active human involvement.

The most elementary AI systems are a series of if-then-else statements, with rules and logic
programmed explicitly by a data scientist. At the simplest level, even a rudimentary thermostat
is a rules-based AI system: when programmed with simple rules like

IF room_temperature < 67, THEN turn_on_heater

and

IF room_temperature > 72, THEN turn_on_air_conditioner

, the thermostat is capable of autonomous decision-making without further human intervention.

At a more complex level, a large and intricate rules-based decision tree programmed by medical
experts could parse symptoms, circumstances and comorbidities to aid diagnosis or prognosis.2

Unlike in expert systems, the logic by which a machine learning model operates isn’t explicitly
programmed—it’s learned through experience. Consider a program that filters email spam: rules-
based AI requires a data scientist to manually devise accurate, universal criteria for spam;
machine learning requires only the selection of an appropriate algorithm and an adequate dataset
of sample emails. In training, the model is shown sample emails and predicts which are spam;
the error of its predictions is calculated, and its algorithm is adjusted to reduce error; this process
is repeated until the model is accurate. The newly trained ML model has implicitly learned how
to identify spam.

As the tasks an AI system is to perform become more complex, rules-based models become
increasingly brittle: it’s often impossible to explicitly define every pattern and variable a model
must consider. Machine learning systems have emerged as the dominant mode of artificial
intelligence because implicitly learning patterns from the data itself is inherently more flexible,
scalable and accessible.

How machine learning works

Machine learning works through mathematical logic. The relevant characteristics (or "features")
of each data point must therefore be expressed numerically, so that the data itself can be fed into
a mathematical algorithm that will "learn" to map a given input to the desired output.

Data points in machine learning are usually represented in vector form, in which each element
(or dimension) of a data point’s vector embedding corresponds to its numerical value for a
specific feature. For data modalities that are inherently numerical, such as financial data or
geospatial coordinates, this is relatively straightforward. But many data modalities, such as text,
images, social media graph data or app user behaviors, are not inherently numerical, and
therefore entail less immediately intuitive feature engineering to be expressed in an ML-ready
way.

The (often manual) process of choosing which aspects of data to use in machine learning
algorithms is called feature selection. Feature extraction techniques refine data down to only its
most relevant, meaningful dimensions. Both are subsets of feature engineering, the broader
discipline of preprocessing raw data for use in machine learning. One notable distinction of deep
learning is that it typically operates on raw data and automates much of the feature
engineering—or at least the feature extraction—process. This makes deep learning more
scalable, albeit less interpretable, than traditional machine learning.

Machine learning model parameters and optimization

For a practical example, consider a simple linear regression algorithm for predicting home sale
prices based on a weighted combination of three variables: square footage, age of house and
number of bedrooms. Each house is represented as a vector embedding with 3 dimensions:

[square footage, bedrooms, age]

. A 30-year-old house with 4 bedrooms and 1900 square feet could be represented as

[1900, 4, 30]

(though for mathematical purposes those numbers might first be scaled, or normalized, to a
more uniform range).

The algorithm is a straightforward mathematical function:

Price = (A * square footage) + (B * number of rooms) – (C * Age) + Base

Price

Here, A, B and C are the model parameters: adjusting them will adjust how heavily the model
weighs each variable. The goal of machine learning is to find the optimal values for such model
parameters. While most real-world instances of machine learning involve more complex
algorithms with a greater number of input variables, the principle remains the same: optimizing
the algorithm's adjustable parameters to yield greater accuracy.

Types of machine learning

All machine learning methods can be categorized as one of three distinct learning
paradigms: supervised learning, unsupervised learning or reinforcement learning, based on the
nature of their training objectives and (often but not always) by the type of training data they
entail.

 Supervised learning trains a model to predict the “correct” output for a given input. It applies to
tasks that require some degree of accuracy relative to some external “ground truth,” such as
classification or regression.
 Unsupervised learning trains a model to discern intrinsic patterns, dependencies and
correlations in data. Unlike in supervised learning, unsupervised learning tasks don’t involve any
external ground truth against which its outputs should be compared.
 Reinforcement learning (RL) trains a model to evaluate its environment and take an action that
will garner the greatest reward. RL scenarios don’t entail the existence of a singular ground
truth, but they do entail the existence of “good” and “bad” (or neutral) actions.

The end-to-end training process for a given model can, and often does, involve hybrid
approaches that leverage more than one of these learning paradigms. For instance, unsupervised
learning is often used to preprocess data for use in supervised or reinforcement learning. Large
language models (LLMs) typically undergo their initial training (pre-training) and fine-
tuning through variants of supervised learning, followed by more fine-tuning through RL
techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

In a similar but distinct practice, various ensemble learning methods aggregate the outputs of
multiple algorithms.

Supervised machine learning

Supervised learning algorithms train models for tasks requiring accuracy, such
as classification or regression. Supervised machine learning powers both state-of-the-art deep
learning models and a wide array of traditional ML models still widely employed across
industries.

 Regression models predict continuous values, such as price, duration, temperature or size.
Examples of traditional regression algorithms include linear regression, polynomial regression
and state space models.
 Classification models predict discrete values, such as the category (or class) a data point belongs
to, a binary decision or a specific action to be taken. Examples of traditional classification
algorithms include support vector machines (SVMs), Naïve Bayes and logistic regression.
 Many supervised ML algorithms can be used for either task. For instance, the output of what’s
nominally a regression algorithm can subsequently be used to inform a classification prediction.

To be measured and optimized for accuracy, a model’s outputs must be compared to a ground
truth: the ideal, “correct” output for any given input. In conventional supervised learning, that
ground truth is provided by labeled data. An email spam detection model is trained on a dataset
of emails that have each been labeled as SPAM or NOT SPAM. An image segmentation model
is trained on images that have been annotated pixel-by-pixel. The goal of supervised learning is
to adjust the model’s parameters until its outputs consistently match the ground truth provided by
those labels.
Essential to supervised learning is the use of a loss function that measures the divergence
(“loss”) between the model’s output and the ground truth across a batch of training inputs. The
objective of supervised learning is defined mathematically as minimizing the output of a loss
function. Once loss has been computed, various optimization algorithms—most of which involve
calculating the derivative(s) of the loss function—are used to identify parameter adjustments that
will reduce loss.

Because this process traditionally requires a human in the loop to provide ground truth in the
form of data annotations, it’s called “supervised” learning. As such, the use of labeled data was
historically considered the definitive characteristic of supervised learning. But on the most
fundamental level, the hallmark of supervised learning is the existence of some ground truth and
the training objective of minimizing the output of loss function that measures divergence from it.

To accommodate a more versatile notion of supervised learning, modern ML terminology uses

“supervision” or “supervisory signals” to refer generically to any source of ground truth.

Self‐supervised learning

Labeling data can become prohibitively costly and time-consuming for complex tasks and large
datasets. Self-supervised learning entails training on tasks in which a supervisory signal is
obtained directly from unlabeled data—hence “self” supervised.

For instance, autoencoders are trained to compress (or encode) input data, then reconstruct
(or decode) the original input using that compressed representation. Their training objective is to
minimize reconstruction error, using the original input itself as ground truth. Self-supervised
learning is also the primary training method for LLMs: models are provided text samples with
certain words hidden or masked and tasked with predicting the missing words.

Self-supervised learning is frequently associated with transfer learning, as it can

provide foundation models with broad capabilities that will then be fine-tuned for more specific
tasks.

Semi‐supervised learning

Whereas self-supervised learning is essentially supervised learning on unlabeled data, semi-

supervised learning methods use both labeled data and unlabeled data. Broadly speaking, semi-
supervised learning comprises techniques that use information from the available labeled data to
make assumptions about the unlabeled data points so that the latter can be incorporated into
supervised learning workflows.

Unsupervised machine learning

Unsupervised machine learning algorithms discern intrinsic patterns in unlabeled data, such as
similarities, correlations or potential groupings. They’re most useful in scenarios where such
patterns aren’t necessarily apparent to human observers. Because unsupervised learning doesn’t
assume the preexistence of a known “correct” output, they don’t require supervisory signals or
conventional loss functions—hence “unsupervised.”

Most unsupervised learning methods perform one of the following functions:

 Clustering algorithms partition unlabeled data points into “clusters,” or groupings, based on
their proximity or similarity to one another. They’re typically used for tasks like market
segmentation or fraud detection. Prominent clustering algorithms include K‐means clustering,
Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and density‐based methods such as DBSCAN.
 Association algorithms discern correlations, such as between a particular action and certain
conditions. For instance, e‐commerce businesses such as Amazon use
unsupervised association models to power recommendation engines.
 Dimensionality reduction algorithms reduce the complexity of data points by representing them
with a smaller number of features—that is, in fewer dimensions—while preserving their
meaningful characteristics. They’re often used for preprocessing data, as well as for tasks such
as data compression or data visualization. Prominent dimensionality reduction algorithms
include autoencoders, principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis
(LDA) and t‐Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t‐SNE).

As their name suggests, unsupervised learning algorithms can be broadly understood as

somewhat “optimizing themselves.” For example, this animation demonstrates how a k-means
clustering algorithm iteratively optimizes the centroid of each cluster on its own. The challenge
of training unsupervised models therefore focuses on effective data preprocessing and
properly tuning hyperparameters that influence the learning process but are not themselves
learnable, such as the learning rate or number of clusters.

Reinforcement learning (RL)

Whereas supervised learning trains models by optimizing them to match ideal exemplars and
unsupervised learning algorithms fit themselves to a dataset, reinforcement learning models are
trained holistically through trial and error. They’re used prominently in robotics, video
games, reasoning models and other use cases in which the space of possible solutions and
approaches are particularly large, open-ended or difficult to define. In RL literature, an AI
system is often referred to as an “agent.”

Rather than the independent pairs of input-output data used in supervised learning, reinforcement
learning (RL) operates on interdependent state-action-reward data tuples. Instead of minimizing
error, the objective of reinforcement learning is optimizing parameters to maximize reward.

A mathematical framework for reinforcement learning is built primarily on the following

components:

 The state space contains all available information relevant to decisions that the model might
make. The state typically changes with each action that the model takes.
  The action space contains all the decisions that the model is permitted to make at a moment. In
a board game, for instance, the action space comprises all legal moves available at a given time.
In text generation, the action space comprises the entire “vocabulary” of tokens available to an
LLM.
 The reward signal is the feedback—positive or negative, typically expressed as a scalar value—
provided to the agent as a result of each action. The value of the reward signal could be
determined by explicit rules, by a reward function, or by a separately trained reward model.
 A policy is the “thought process” that drives an RL agent’s behavior. Mathematically speaking, a
policy ( π ) is a function that takes a state ( s ) as input and returns an action ( a ): π(s)→a .

In policy-based methods like proximal policy optimization (PPO), the model learns a policy
directly. In value-based methods like Q-learning, the agent learns a value function that computes
a score for how “good” each state is, then chooses actions that lead to higher-value states.
Consider a maze: a policy-based agent might learn “at this corner, turn left,” while a value-based
agent learns a score for each position and simply moves to an adjacent position with a better
score. Hybrid approaches, such as actor-critic methods, learn a value function that’s then used to
optimize a policy.

In deep reinforcement learning, the policy is represented as a neural network.

Deep learning

Deep learning employs artificial neural networks with many layers—hence “deep”—rather than
the explicitly designed algorithms of traditional machine learning. Though neural networks were
introduced early in the history of machine learning, it wasn’t until the late 2000s and early 2010s,
enabled in part by advancements in GPUs, that they became dominant in most subfields of AI.

Loosely inspired by the human brain, neural networks comprise interconnected layers of
“neurons” (or nodes), each of which performs its own mathematical operation (called an
“activation function”). The output of each node’s activation function serves as input to each of
the nodes of the following layer and so on until the final layer, where the network’s final output
is computed. Crucially, the activation functions performed at each node are nonlinear, enabling
neural networks to model complex patterns and dependencies.