Why is machine learning so popular?

With the increasing scale and complexity of business environment, the problems which businesses face now a day are extremely complex and complicated. This has led to the popularity of machine learning wherein organizations are investing heavily on data & information infrastructure, hiring machine learning experts & data scientists, and further integrating the ML software to the existing products & services demanded by the industry.

There are three major reasons why Machine Learning has become so popular right now:

  1. It has matured both in terms of identity and in terms of methods-tools.
  2. There is an abundance of data available.
  3. There is an abundance of computation to run methods.

An example of this popularity is the response to Stanford’s online machine learning course that had more than 100K people showing expressions of interest in the first year it ran.

Also, there are two factors that make machine learning methods different from other methods:

  1. They are programs that learn from data; analyse and learn the structure already resident in that data in order to provide a solution to the problem you are trying to solve.
  2. They are programs that make programs that address problems; a machine learning model captures all of the micro-decisions needed to be performed to address the higher-order problem being solved.