Three Kinds of Machine Learning

Guest Written By Rebecca Njeri
​
Last Thursday, I attended the machinery.ai conference in Seattle, WA, and got to listen to talks by Machine Learning experts that ranged from Machine Thinking to Integrating Data Science into Legacy Products. After about 1.5 years of learning and practising data science, this conference reminded me of the things that intrigued me when I first started learning data science, and I thought that I should write a post explaining the three different groups of machine learning algorithms.

Machine Learning can be defined as the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. It can be further divided into three broad categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. A machine learning model should be chosen depending on the nature of the data available as will be illustrated below.

Asish Bansal premised his talk, Machine Thinking, by stating that not all business problems need a machine learning or deep learning solution. He argued that most business problems have a software engineering solution, and later, if need be, a machine learning or deep learning solution can be developed. To illustrate his point, he used the “FizzBuzz in TensorFlow interview” example where Joel Grus codes, as a joke, a TensorFlow solution to the fizzbuzz problem.  

Bansal’s talk reminded me of the importance of the business understanding and data understanding parts of the CRISP-DM process. Understanding the kind of data available: numbers, words, images, or voice data, labelled versus unlabeled, will determine what kind, if any, machine learning algorithm is the appropriate solution.

​

Supervised Learning

The main goal of supervised learning is to learn a model from labeled training data that allows us to make predictions about unseen or future data(Python Machine Learning, 3). Supervised learning can be divided into two categories depending on the outcome. If the outcome is a continuous value, we have a regression model, and if the outcome is discrete class labels, there is a classification model. There can be both binary classification models and multi-class classification models.

The simplest example of a regression problem is y = mx + c, where a univariate independent variable x is correlated with a dependent variable y, and an equation can be fit to known values, and used to predict unknown values of y given x. Another example of a regression problem, to once more borrow from the machinery.ai talks, is how long a person’s commute how will take given a labelled training set that has weather information and time of day as the independent variables, and commute times as the associated response variable.

Commonly occurring examples of binary classification problems in business analytics include: whether a customer churn or not churn, whether a lead convert or not, whether a transaction is fraud, whether an email is spam or not, among others.

Multi-class classification problems are similar to binary classification problems except there are more than two class labels. An example of this can be a classification of the different demographics of people who frequent a bookstore where labels can include: children under five, teens, young adults, adults, etc. Clearly segregating the shoppers can facilitate more efficient marketing campaigns and help the store’s bottom line.

Reinforcement Learning

In reinforcement learning, the goal is to develop a system that improves its performance based on interactions with the environment. The term reinforcement learning is actually borrowed from psychology which refers to any “stimulus which strengthens or increases the probability of a specific response. For example, if you want your dog to sit on command you may give him a treat every time he sits for you.”

For a machine learning example, when a self driving car takes a sharp turn too fast and moves outside its lane, it learns to adjust its speed the next time it takes that turn to ensure it stays within its lane. A reinforcement learning model improves its performance because it learns as it interacts with its environment.

Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning is machine learning where there is unlabeled data or data of unknown structure. Examples of unsupervised learning algorithms include clustering and dimensionality reduction such as Principal Component Analysis. The model tries to learn patterns and correlations within the data on its own. Without an associated response variable Y, the goal is to “discover interesting things about the measurements: is there an informative way to visualize the data? Can we discover subgroups among the variables or among the observations?”

If the bookstore problem was presented without the class labels of the shoppers, a clustering algorithm could be fit to the data to separate the shoppers into different groups.

Conclusion

Almost every data science talk I have listened to underlines the fact that majority of data science work is data mining and data cleaning before any machine learning models can be built. In fact, most supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms are available in Python’s sklearn library, in RStudio, or some other form of open source software. Ultimately, an intimate understanding of the data that is available, and the implementation of the different machine learning algorithms, is necessary to leverage the power of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.

Additional Resources

Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Class on Coursera

Just for gags: Alexa And Google Home Are Scheming Against Apple's HomePod

Read More Data Science and Machine Learning Blog Posts

Creating A Better Algorithm With Boosting and Bagging

How To Survive Corporate Politics As A Data Scientists

Statistics Review For Data Scientists

A Guide To Starting A New Data Science Project
​
How To Grow A Data Science Team