Simpler Machine Learning

AI is the rage these days. Not long ago, AI, or Artificial Intelligence, used to be called Machine Learning, and Machine Learning is actually a more descriptive term for what AI does today. Machine learning is a complex topic. This website attempts to present it to you in a simpler way. The “machine” in machine learning refers to an ordinary digital computer. The “learning” means that the computer runs programs that can learn to recognize patterns purely from sets of data. Recognizing patterns can mean learning how to classify the data into different types, such as whether the data for a given person translates into having a given disease or not. It can also mean learning how to predict a continuous variable as the output of the machine learning program, such as a salary, from the given data set.

Machine learning comes in numerous different varieties. These varieties are called machine learning models. The models can be classified in different ways. A common classification is as follows:

Supervised Learning

Supervised learning models are “trained” on known datasets. A known or example dataset consists of a set of vectors or arrays of example numbers with corresponding numerical labels. We refer to a vector or array of example numbers as a data point. Such an example dataset is presented repeatedly to the machine learning training algorithm until the labels predicted by the algorithm are close enough to the labels in the example dataset. The trained model is then “run” on an unknown dataset. An unknown dataset consists of a set of data points of identical dimension to the data points in the example dataset, but with no given labels. The labels for each data point are predicted by the machine learning model.

Unsupervised Learning

The datasets for unsupervised learning models consist of data points that do not have corresponding labels. The model groups the data points together using some intrinsic criterion, such as the distance in n-dimensional space between the data points. A new data point that the model has not seen before is then analysed using the same criterion, such as using the distance with the pre-existing data points, to associate it with the appropriate group.

Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning models combine a small quantity of labeled data points with a large quantity of unlabeled data points. Labeling a set of data points can be an expensive process. Thus, semi-supervised learning models are useful in applications where it is difficult to collect labeled data points.

From the viewpoint of utility, I prefer classifying the models simply as “neural networks” and “miscellaneous models”. These can then be interpreted using the classification framework given above as needed. This is because neural networks are the most useful kinds of machine learning models.

Neural Networks

There are many types of neural networks. The most relevant of them for our purposes are given below. All of these are supervised learning models.

Multi-layer Perceptrons

A multi-layer perceptron is a network of “neurons” and “weights”. The neurons and weights are organized into layers. There is an input layer, an output layer, and one or more hidden layers between the input layer and the output layer. The perceptron is first trained on labeled data points and then run on unlabeled data points. Values flow from the input layer to the output layer. In the process, they are multiplied by the weights and transformed by the neurons. While training, the values at the output layer flow back through the neural network in a process of updating the weights. While running, the values simply flow forward. The multi-layer perceptron is in some way the basis for all other kinds of neural networks. It is described in detail in the Introducing Neural Networks section of this website.

Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks are multi-layer perceptrons with a twist. The twist is that in addition to values feeding forward from the input layer to the output layer, the values coming out of each hidden layer go back into that hidden layer. For simplicity, consider a recurrent neural network with one hidden layer. As each new set of values arrives at the input layer, the values that were previously fed from the input layer to the hidden layer now feed from the hidden layer back into itself. This gives the recurrent neural network a trace across time. It is effectively a memory. Recurrent neural networks are useful in applications where the data is sequenced across time. Examples are speech recognition and the translation of text from one language to another. Recurrent neural networks are described in detail in the Recurrent Neural Networks section of this website.

Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks are typically used in applications where the inputs are square or rectangular arrays, such as images. The array is actually an array of simple numbers: any image can be represented as an array of numbers. The output of the convolutional neural network may be a classification of the image into different types, such as dogs, cats, and mice. This is a powerful possibility, and can be used in advanced applications such as self driving cars.

Deep Learning

You may have heard of the term “deep learning” in the context of machine learning. A deep learning model is simply a neural network which has more than one hidden layer. This applies to multi-layer perceptrons, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and other types of neural networks. Also, a deep learning model may combine layers corresponding to different neural network models. A convolutional neural network deep learning model usually contains some simple perceptron layers (these are also called fully connected layers). In practice, deep learning models may contain along the lines of 10 to 20 layers.

Miscellaneous Models

As mentioned earlier, there are a large number of machine learning models. Some of the more useful models are: K Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, K Means Clustering, Principal Component Analysis, and Decision Trees and Random Forests.

The Power of Machine Learning

The power of machine learning comes from the fact that there can be thousands (or millions, or even billions now) of examples that constitute an extremely detailed pattern to be learned by the machine learning model. The model then generalizes from the available examples of the pattern to the underlying mapping between the inputs and outputs. In this way, machine learning models are now able to effectively transcribe speech to text, recognize faces and other images, diagnose diseases from raw patient data, and perform a host of other tasks. The processing done by sophisticated machine learning models takes a lot of computational power. Computational power has been approximately doubling every two years for the last several decades, and the power needed for these sophisticated models has just recently become available. This, along with recent theoretical advances in machine learning has turned the present period into a golden age of machine learning.