A very high-level overview of machine learning technology

Machine learning mimicking human intelligence is a subfield of AI—a field of computer science concerned with creating systems. Software engineering is another field in computer science. Generally, we can label Python programming as a type of software engineering. Machine learning is also closely related to linear algebra, probability theory, statistics, and mathematical optimization. We usually build machine learning models based on statistics, probability theory, and linear algebra, then optimize the models using mathematical optimization. The majority of you reading this book should have a good, or at least sufficient, command of Python programming. Those who aren't feeling confident about mathematical knowledge might be wondering how much time should be spent learning or brushing up on the aforementioned subjects. Don't panic: we'll get machine learning to work for us without going into any mathematical details in this book. It just requires some basic 101 knowledge of probability theory and linear algebra, which helps us to understand the mechanics of machine learning techniques and algorithms. And it gets easier as we'll be building models both from scratch and with popular packages in Python, a language we like and are familiar with.

Those who want to study machine learning systematically can enroll into computer science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and, more recently, data science masters programs. There are also various data science boot camps. However, the selection for boot camps is usually stricter as they're more job-oriented and the program duration is often short, ranging from 4 to 10 weeks. Another option is the free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Andrew Ng's popular course on machine learning. Last but not least, industry blogs and websites are great resources for us to keep up with the latest developments.

Machine learning isn't only a skill but also a bit of sport. We can compete in several machine learning competitions, such as Kaggle (www.kaggle.com)—sometimes for decent cash prizes, sometimes for joy, and most of the time to play our strengths. However, to win these competitions, we may need to utilize certain techniques, which are only useful in the context of competitions and not in the context of trying to solve a business problem. That's right, the no free lunch theorem applies here.