The fundamentals and terminology of artificial intelligence

Machine learning and deep learning

AI is the discipline in computer science that develops computer systems that can simulate human intelligence and perform tasks that generally require humans (see Glossary for key concepts). This discipline can be further narrowed down into ML and its subdiscipline deep learning(Figure 1). ML can be described as an algorithm that learns from data by automatically mapping input data to an output prediction. While this draws a parallel to traditional regression methods such as ordinary least squares, most machine learning techniques have the advantage of inherently modeling complex patterns, including non-linearity and interaction effects. ML concentrates primarily on prediction and finding patterns in vast amounts of data without making prior assumptions about the distribution of these data. The predictive performance generally improves when more (high-quality) data is fed to the algorithm.