welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Grokking Machine Learning.

Machine learning is, without a doubt, one of the hottest  topics in the world right now. Most companies are using it, or planning to use it, for many applications. Some people dub machine learning as the new electricity,  or the new industrial revolution. I would go a  bit farther and call it the new renaissance. Why? Because in the Renaissance, progress was made in the arts, the sciences, engineering, mathematics, and almost all the fields by the same people. With machine learning, this is finally possible again. With a strong knowledge of  machine learning, one is able to derive cutting edge results in almost  any field one decides to apply them, and this is fascinating. And that is what this book is for, to get you up to speed with the fast-moving world of machine learning!

But what is machine learning? I define it as “common sense, but for a computer.” What does  this  mean? It means  that  machine  learning  is  the  practice  of  getting  computers  to make decisions using the decision-making process that we, humans, utilize in our daily life. Humans make many decisions based on past experiences, and we can teach this decision- making  process  to  the  computer,  with  the  difference  that  computers  call  their  past experiences “data.