Getting Started with Machine Learning

A lot of Machine Learning (ML) projects consist of fitting a (normally very complicated) function to a dataset with the objective of calculating a number like 1 or 0 (is it spam or not?) for classification problems or a set of numbers (e.g., weekly sales of a product) for regression ones. Yes, it's all about numbers and loads of operations which a computer is very good at. Consider the gender recognition by voice dataset which can be found in this Kaggle page. The objective with this dataset is, when given a speech signal, to identify whether it is from a male or female. This challenge falls under the category of a classification problem.