AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is ML (machine learning)?
Machine learning (also called ML): A way of building software in which a program improves at a task by finding patterns in example data instead of following hand-written rules. The result is a fitted model that can make predictions on new inputs. It matters because many problems, such as spam filtering or fraud detection, are too messy to capture with explicit rules.
Machine learning: an example
Instead of coding rules for spotting fake UPI payment requests, a bank trains a program on thousands of labelled genuine and fraudulent transactions so it learns the patterns itself.
Related terms
More ML fundamentals terms
- Majority-class baseline
- Manifold hypothesis
- Meta-learning
- Model
- Model capacity
- Model selection
- Model variance
- Nested cross-validation
Where you learn it
Machine learning is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.