| Ryan Paul Lafler |
Machine learning is experiencing a golden age of investment, democratization, and accessibility across all domains in the life sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences with applications to industry for business decision-making, risk management, consumer marketing, clinical trials, financial forecasting, security recognition, video remastering, digital twin simulations, and more. But what exactly is machine learning (ML)? How is it connected to Artificial Intelligence (AI)? And most importantly, how can data scientists, programmers, software engineers, and/or researchers start their endeavors into machine learning? This paper answers these questions, and more, by providing a roadmap to help navigate the complexities of machine learning in an application-oriented guide. This paper covers the main aspects of machine learning including supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised approaches as well as deep learning. The roadmap for supervised machine learning starts with linear regression and progressively builds towards more complex and flexible algorithms with discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of using certain models over others. This paper discusses the real-world applications of both labeled and unlabeled data; supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms; overfitting and underfitting; cross-validation; and the importance of hyperparameter tuning to better fit algorithms to their data. |