Machine Learning (ML) Discipline

Context:
- It can involve:
  - Machine Learning Research Activity, that can produce Machine Learning Algorithms and propose new Machine Learning Tasks.
  - Machine Learning Education, that can produce Machine Learning Practitioners of the Machine Learning Practice.
  - Machine LearningAcademic Literature, such as Machine LearningJournals and Machine Learning Textbooks.
- It can propose Machine Learning Concepts (likely referenced by a machine learning terminology).
- It can support the Theory of Fundamental Laws that govern all Learning Process.
- It can be supported by a Machine Learning Research Community.
- ...
Example(s):
- Semi-Supervised Learning Discipline.
- …
Counter-Example(s):
See: Machine Learning Task, Computer Science Discipline.

References

(Wikipedia, 2013) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
- Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is about the construction and study of systems that can learn from data. For example, a machine learning system could be trained on email messages to learn to distinguish between spam and non-spam messages. After learning, it can then be used to classify new email messages into spam and non-spam folders.
  The core of machine learning deals with representation and generalization. Representation of data instances and functions evaluated on these instances are part of all machine learning systems. Generalization is the property that the system will perform well on unseen data instances; the conditions under which this can be guaranteed are a key object of study in the subfield of computational learning theory.
  There is a wide variety of machine learning tasks and successful applications. Optical character recognition, in which printed characters are recognized automatically based on previous examples, is a classic example of machine learning.^[1]

↑ Wernick, Yang, Brankov, Yourganov and Strother, Machine Learning in Medical Imaging, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 27, no. 4, July 2010, pp. 25-38

http://www.chalearn.org/
- Machine Learning is the science of building hardware or software that can achieve tasks by learning from examples. The examples often come as {input, output} pairs.

http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/glossary.htm
- Machine Learning: The ability of a machine to improve its performance based on previous results.
http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/ETH/Exam_Questions.html
- Machine Learning is a discipline dedicated to the design and study of artificial learning systems, particularly systems that learn from examples. Learning machines include linear models, artificial neural networks, and decisions trees.

(Mitchell, 2006) ⇒ Tom M. Mitchell. (2006). “The Discipline of Machine Learning." Machine Learning Department technical report CMU-ML-06-108, Carnegie Mellon University.
- A scientific field is best defined by the central question it studies. The field of Machine Learning seeks to answer the question “How can we build computer systems that automatically improve with experience, and what are the fundamental laws that govern all learning processes?”
- Whereas Computer Science has focused primarily on how to manually program computers, Machine Learning focuses on the question of how to get computers to program themselves (from experience plus some initial structure).
- Whereas Statistics has focused primarily on what conclusions can be inferred from data, Machine Learning incorporates additional questions about what computational architectures and algorithms can be used to most effectively capture, store, index, retrieve and merge these data, how multiple learning subtasks can be orchestrated in a larger system, and questions of computational tractability.

(Kohavi & Provost, 1998) ⇒ Ron Kohavi, and Foster Provost. (1998). “Glossary of Terms.” In: Machine Leanring 30(2-3).
- Machine learning: In Knowledge Discovery, machine learning is most commonly used to mean the application of induction algorithms, which is one step in the knowledge discovery process. This is similar to the definition of empirical learning or inductive learning in Readings in Machine Learning by Shavlik and Dietterich. Note that in their definition, training examples are “externally supplied, whereas here they are assumed to be supplied by a previous stage of the knowledge discovery process. Machine Learning is the field of scientific study that concentrates on induction algorithms and on other algorithms that can be said to “learn.

Arthur Samuel.
- "The field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed."