Making Sense of Machine Learning

Broadly speaking, machine learners are computer algorithms designed for pattern recognition, curve fitting, classification and clustering. To keep things simple, I will refer to well-known statistical techniques like regression and factor analysis as older machine learners and methods such as artificial neural networks as newer machine learners since they are generally less familiar to marketing researchers. They come in many flavors and are used for classification, regression, clustering, text mining and for assortment of real-time analytics. AdaBoost, likewise, is versatile and not restricted to decision trees as the base learner, though decision trees are fast to run and usually adequate.