The 'Ingredients' of Machine Learning Algorithms

The esoteric nuances of machine learning algorithms and terminology can easily overwhelm the machine learning novice. As I was reading the Deep Learning book by Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and Ian Goodfellow, I was ecstatic when I reached the section that explained the common "recipe" that almost all machine learning algorithms share -- a dataset, a cost function, an optimization procedure, and a model. In this article, I summarize each universal'ingredient' of machine learning algorithms by dissecting them into their simplest components. With these'ingredients' in mind, you no longer have to view each new machine learning algorithm you encounter as an entity isolated from the others, but rather a unique combination of the four common elements described below. There are many types of machine learning algorithms.