Part 2. Core learning algorithms

When former US President Barack Obama said, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he wasn’t referring to how most complex ideas in machine learning boil down to just a few foundational ideas, but he might as well have been. For example, the core algorithms are regression, classification, clustering, and hidden Markov models. The concepts are each detailed in their respective chapters, in the order listed.

After you master these four chapters, you’ll see how most real-world problems can be solved using similar techniques. What were once foreign or unintuitive complications can now be untangled using the formulations from these core learning algorithms.