Data Scientist's Dilemma: The Cold Start Problem – Ten Machine Learning Examples

The ancient philosopher Confucius has been credited with saying "study your past to know your future." This wisdom applies not only to life but to machine learning also. Specifically, the availability and application of labeled data (things past) for the labeling of previously unseen data (things future) is fundamental to supervised machine learning. Without labels (diagnoses, classes, known outcomes) in past data, then how do we make progress in labeling (explaining) future data? This would be a problem. A related problem also arises in unsupervised machine learning.