Algorithmic learning from data. A form of Pattern Recognition.
The machine-learning tag is used for questions related to systems learning from data. This often involves training an algorithm with data and then testing it. Data sets are typically very structured and even calibrated or designed for a machine learning approach. Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, concerns 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 are 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.
