Machine Learning: An In-Depth, Non-Technical Guide

This is the first chapter of a five-part series about machine learning. Machine learning is a very hot topic for many key reasons, and because it provides the ability to automatically obtain deep insights, recognize unknown patterns, and create high performing predictive models from data, all without requiring explicit programming instructions. Despite the popularity of the subject, machine learning's true purpose and details are not well understood, except by very technical folks and/or data scientists. This series is intended to be a comprehensive, in-depth, and non-technical guide to machine learning, and should be useful to everyone from business executives to machine learning practitioners. It covers virtually all aspects of machine learning (and many related fields) at a high level, and should serve as a sufficient introduction or reference to the terminology, concepts, tools, considerations, and techniques of the field.