How do you explain Machine Learning and Data Mining to non-Computer Science people?

Question

How do you explain Machine Learning and Data Mining to non-Computer Science people?

Answer 1

Machine Learning and Data Mining are ways of programming computers to find patterns in data and make automatic decisions. Decisions can take many different forms including predictions, e.g. of the weather or house prices or customer behavior, or classifications, like whether a spoken word in a recording is "hello" or whether a photograph contains a face.

Humans are not so good at prediction, but they are good at tasks like identifying people and facial expressions from photographs, thanks to millions of years of brain evolution. But computers can be trained to do this, and an effective way is to program the computer in such a way that it gets better at the task the more data it has to train on. In other words, ML programs are not just a set of rules, because rules may change depending on the task and as new information comes in. When humans adapt to new situations or information to make decisions about how to act, we call this learning. So we call computer programs that mimic this behavior "machine learning".  If you are a beginner and want to know more about Machine Learning, then check out the Machine Learning Course by Intellipaat which will teach you ML from basics:

If you are a non-programmer and want to know more about ML and Data Science the do check out the following video:

And if you are more into youtube tutorials then here is an awesome video tutorial by Intellipaat which will clear all your doubts regarding the same:

If you want to learn machine learning basics, then check out the Machine Learning Tutorial by Intellipaat: