4 Setting the Stage
“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill”
Albert Einstein
In the past three chapters, we took a quick journey through machine learning and its foundational mathematics by working through an example of a real-life problem. We saw in Chapter 1 how we proposed a model for the traveling diabetes clinic problem by assuming that the relation we're trying to learn has the form of a linear function. Afterward, in Chapters 2 and 3, we saw that by studying the data using statistics and probability theory we were able get much more accurate results by modeling all the probability distributions directly. However, it's not always the case that modeling probability distribution is better than using a function as a model; the two modeling approaches are widely adopted in the field as one of them can work on some problems while the other can’t.