What Are Machine Learning and Data Mining?

This chapter is about two very powerful areas of analytics. However, are they really two distinct areas? It explores that question as well as important, elementary foundations in these areas. The chapter provides a few examples of the types of problems machine learning and data mining can solve. It also explores the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques compared with business intelligence (BI) and also provides a brief contrast to the next chapter on artificial intelligence (AI). In brief, AI precedes machine learning, just barely. AI research was first performed during a “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” conference in the summer of 1956. Arthur Samuel coined the term “machine learning” in 1959 while at IBM. The way Samuel coined the term implied that machine learning was a subset of AI. “Data mining” research came many years later, in 1995, at the “First International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.”.