Hello, and welcome!

In this video I will give you a high level introduction to Machine Learning.
So let’s get started.
This is a human cell sample extracted from a patient.
And this cell has characteristics … for example, its Clump thickness is 6, its
Uniformity
of cell size is 1, its Marginal adhesion is 1, and so on.
One of the interesting questions we can ask at this point is: "Is this a Benign or
Malignant
cell?"
In contrast with a benign tumor, a malignant tumor is a tumor that may invade its
surrounding
tissue or spread around the body, and diagnosing it early might be the key to a
patient’s
survival.
One could easily presume that only a doctor with years of experience could diagnose
that
tumor and say if the patient is developing cancer or not.
Right?
Well, imagine that you’ve obtained a dataset containing characteristics of
thousands of
human cell samples extracted from patients who were believed to be at risk of
developing
cancer.
Analysis of the original data showed that many of the characteristics differed
significantly
between benign and malignant samples.
You can use the values of these cell characteristics in samples from other patients
to give an
early indication of whether a new sample might be benign or malignant.
You should clean your data, select a proper algorithm for building a prediction
model,
and train your model to understand patterns of benign or malignant cells within the
data.
Once the model has been trained by going through data iteratively, it can be used
to predict
your new or unknown cell with a rather high accuracy.
This is machine learning!
It is the way that a machine learning model can do a doctor’s task or at least help
that doctor make the process faster.
Now, let me give a formal definition of machine learning.
Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives "computers the
ability
to learn without being explicitly programmed.”
Let me explain what I mean when I say “without being explicitly programmed.”
Assume that you have a dataset of images of animals such as cats and dogs, and you
want
to have software or an application that can recognize and differentiate them.
The first thing that you have to do here is interpret the images as a set of
feature sets.
For example, does the image show the animal’s eyes?
If so, what is their size?
Does it have ears?
What about a tail?
How many legs?
Does it have wings?
Prior to machine learning, each image would be transformed to a vector of features.
Then, traditionally, we had to write down some rules or methods in order to get
computers
to be intelligent and detect the animals.
But, it was a failure.
Why?
Well, as you can guess, it needed a lot of rules, highly dependent on the current
dataset,
and not generalized enough to detect out-of-sample cases.
This is when machine learning entered the scene.
Using machine learning allows us to build a model that looks at all the feature
sets,
and their corresponding type of animals, and learn it learns the pattern of each
animal.
It is a model built by machine learning algorithms.
It detects without explicitly being programmed to do so.
In essence, machine learning follows the same process that a 4-year-old child uses
to learn,
understand, and differentiate animals.
So, machine learning algorithms, inspired by the human learning process,
iteratively
learn from data, and allow computers to find hidden insights.
These models help us in a variety of tasks, such as object recognition,
summarization,
recommendation, and so on.
Machine Learning impacts society in a very influential way.
Here are some real-life examples.
First, how do you think Netflix and Amazon recommend videos, movies, and TV shows
to its users?
They use Machine Learning to produce suggestions that you might enjoy!
This is similar to how your friends might recommend a television show to you based
on their knowledge of the types of shows you like to watch.
How do you think banks make a decision when approving a loan application?
They use machine learning to predict the probability of default for each applicant,
and then approve
or refuse the loan application based on that probability.
Telecommunication companies use their customers’ demographic data to segment them,
or predict
if they will unsubscribe from their company the next month.
There are many other applications of machine learning that we see every day in our
daily
life, such as chatbots, logging into our phones or even computer games using face
recognition.
Each of these use different machine learning techniques and algorithms.
So, let’s quickly examine a few of the more popular techniques.
The Regression/Estimation technique is used for predicting a continuous value, for
example,
predicting things like the price of a house based on its characteristics, or to
estimate
the Co2 emission from a car’s engine.
A Classification technique is used for Predicting the class or category of a case,
for example,
if a cell is benign or malignant, or whether or not a customer will churn.
Clustering groups of similar cases, for example, can find similar patients, or can
be used
for customer segmentation in the banking field.
Association technique is used for finding items or events that often co-occur, for
example,
grocery items that are usually bought together by a particular customer.
Anomaly detection is used to discover abnormal and unusual cases, for example, it
is used
for credit card fraud detection.
Sequence mining is used for predicting the next event, for instance, the click-
stream
in websites.
Dimension reduction is used to reduce the size of data.
And finally, recommendation systems; this associates people's preferences with
others
who have similar tastes, and recommends new items to them, such as books or movies.
We will cover some of these techniques in the next videos.
By this point, I’m quite sure this question has crossed your mind, “What is the
difference
between these buzzwords that we keep hearing these days, such as Artificial
intelligence
(or AI), Machine Learning and Deep Learning?”
Well, let me explain what is different between them.
In brief, AI tries to make computers intelligent in order to mimic the cognitive
functions
of humans.
So, Artificial Intelligence is a general field with a broad scope including:
Computer Vision,
Language Processing, Creativity, and Summarization.
Machine Learning is the branch of AI that covers the statistical part of artificial
intelligence.
It teaches the computer to solve problems by looking at hundreds or thousands of
examples,
learning from them, and then using that experience to solve the same problem in new
situations.
And Deep Learning is a very special field of Machine Learning where computers can
actually
learn and make intelligent decisions on their own.
Deep learning involves a deeper level of automation in comparison with most machine
learning algorithms.
Now that we’ve completed the introduction to Machine Learning, subsequent videos
will
focus on reviewing two main components: First, you’ll be learning about the purpose
of Machine Learning and where it can be applied in the real world; and
Second, you’ll get a general overview of Machine Learning topics, such as
supervised
vs unsupervised learning, model evaluation and various Machine Learning algorithms.
So now that you have a sense with what’s in store on this journey, let’s continue
our exploration of Machine Learning!
Thanks for watching!