Online learning: Machine learning's secret for big data

In the field of machine learning, online learning refers to the collection of machine learning methods that learn from a sequence of data provided over time. In online learning, models update continuously as each data point arrives. You often hear online learning described as analyzing "data in motion," because it treats data as a running stream and it learns as the stream flows. Classical offline learning (batch learning) treats data as a static pool, assuming that all data is available at the time of training. Given a dataset, offline learning produces only one final model, with all the data considered simultaneously.