Introduction to Machine Learning (opens in new tab)

The main focus of machine learning (ML) is making decisions or predictions based on data. There are a number of other fields with significant overlap in technique, but difference in focus: in economics and psychology, the goal is to discover underlying causal processes and in statistics it is to find a model that fits a data set well. In those fields, the end product is a model. In machine learning, we often fit models, but as a means to the end of making good predictions or decisions.