What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning is the study of algorithms that improve through experience. The lecturer opened with Tom Mitchell’s classic definition: a program learns from experience E with respect to task T and performance measure P.
Supervised learning
Given labelled pairs (x, y), the goal is to learn f: X → Y. Compare this to Lecture 3 — Gradient descent, where we’ll see how f is fit from data.
A loss function quantifies how bad a prediction is. Training minimises it.