Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will soon be at the heart of every major technological system in the world including: cyber and homeland security, payments, financial markets, biotech, healthcare, marketing, natural language processing, computer vision, electrical grids, nuclear power plants, air traffic control, and Internet of Things.

While A.I. seems to have only recently captured the attention of humanity, the reality is that A.I. has been around for over 60 years as a technological discipline. In the late 1950’s, Arthur Samuel wrote a checkers playing program that could learn from its mistakes and thus, over time, became better at playing the game. MYCIN, the first rule-based expert system, was developed in the early 1970’s and was capable of diagnosing blood infections based on the results of various medical tests. The MYCIN system was able to perform better than non-specialist doctors.

While Artificial Intelligence is becoming a major staple of technology, few people understand the benefits and shortcomings of A.I. and Machine Learning technologies.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning is applied in various fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, NLP, web search, biotech, risk management, cyber security, and many others.

The machine learning paradigm can be viewed as “programming by example”. Two types of learning are commonly used: supervised and unsupervised. In supervised learning, a collection of labeled patterns is provided, and the learning process is measured by the quality of labeling a newly encountered pattern. The labeled patterns are used to learn the descriptions of classes which in turn are used to label a new pattern. In the case of unsupervised learning, the problem is to group a given collection of unlabeled patterns into meaningful categories.

Within supervised learning, there are two different types of labels: classification and regression.

In classification learning, the goal is to categorize objects into fixed specific categories. Regression learning, on the other hand, tries to predict a real value. For instance, we may wish to predict changes in the price of a stock and both methods can be applied to derive insights. The classification method is used to determine if the stock price will rise or fall, and the regression method is used to predict how much the stock will increase or decrease.

Author :

Santosh Lahane ( Lean Six Sigma Consultant - Trainee)