The essence of machine learning is function estimation

There is no denying in that. In this post we will try to make it a little uncool, well it will still be cool but you may start looking at it differently. Machine learning is not a black box. It is intuitive and this post is just to convey that. If I give you this function f(x) x 2 log(x) and ask you to tell me what will be f(2), you will first laugh at me and then run away to do something important.