Machine Learning Goes Mainstream: PLOS Medicine 15th Anniversary Speaking of Medicine

The journal continues to take on big and tough issues as exemplified by the November 2018 special issue "Machine Learning in Health and Biomedicine." As computational power increases exponentially, the capacity to (more affordably) handle, store, and analyze "big data" using machine learning (ML) will revolutionize science and medicine. The power of ML is to find patterns among variables in large data sets rather than being programmed with rules. Models become more complex when they move from supervised (input and outputs have labels) to unsupervised (no labels), and when they move from linear regression with decision trees to neural networks ( 3 neural networks is termed deep learning). As the complexity increases so does one's ability to "interpret" the data.