Marketing Machines: Is Machine Learning Helping Marketers or Making Us Obsolete?

Supervised learning systems rely upon humans to label the incoming data -- at least to begin with -- in order for the systems to better predict how to classify future input data. Gmail's spam filter is a great example of this. When you label incoming mail as either spam or not spam, you're not only cleaning up your inbox, you're also training Gmail's filter (a machine learning system) to identify what you consider to be spam (or not spam) in the future. According to Tommy, this type of machine learning can be likened to the relationship between a parent and a young child. When a child does something positive they're rewarded.