How does Machine Learning work? – Towards Data Science

This is the second in a series of articles intended to make Machine Learning more approachable to those without technical training. The first article, which describes typical uses and examples of Machine Learning, can be found here. In this installment of the series, a simple example will be used to illustrate the underlying process of learning from positive and negative examples, which is the simplest form of classification learning. I have erred on the side of simplicity to make the principles of Machine Learning accessible to all, but I should emphasize that real life use cases are rarely as simple as this. Imagine that a company has a recruiting process which looks at many thousands of applications and separates them into two groups -- those who have'high potential' to receive a job with the company, and those who do not.