All Machine Learning Systems

There are so many different types of Machine Learning systems that it is useful to classify them in broad categories, based on the following criteria:

Whether or not they are trained with human supervision (supervised, unsupervised, semisupervised, and Reinforcement Learning)
Whether or not they can learn incrementally on the fly (online versus batch learning)
Whether they work by simply comparing new data points to known data points, or instead by detecting patterns in the training data and building a predictive model, much like scientists do (instance-based versus model-based learning)

These criteria are not exclusive; you can combine them in any way you like. For example, a state-of-the-art spam filter may learn on the fly using a deep neural network model trained using examples of spam and ham; this makes it an online, modelbased, supervised learning system. Let’s look at each of these criteria a bit more closely.

Supervised/Unsupervised Learning: Machine Learning Systems

Machine Learning systems can be classified according to the amount and type of supervision they get during training. There are four major categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semisupervised learning, and Reinforcement Learning.

Supervised learning

In supervised learning, the training set you feed to the algorithm includes the desired solutions, called labels.

A typical supervised learning task is classification. The spam filter is a good example of this: it is trained with many example emails along with their class (spam or ham), and it must learn how to classify new emails.

Another typical task is to predict a target numeric value, such as the price of a car, given a set of features (mileage, age, brand, etc.) called predictors. This sort of task is called regression To train the system, you need to give it many examples of cars, including both their predictors and their labels.

Note that some regression algorithms can be used for classification as well, and vice versa. For example, Logistic Regression is commonly used for classification, as it can output a value that corresponds to the probability of belonging to a given class.

Here are some of the most important supervised learning algorithms:

k-Nearest Neighbors
Linear Regression
Logistic Regression
Support Vector Machines (SVMs)
Decision Trees and Random Forests
Neural networks

Unsupervised learning

In unsupervised learning, as you might guess, the training data is unlabeled. The system tries to learn without a teacher.

Here are some of the most important unsupervised learning algorithms:

Clustering

— K-Means

— DBSCAN

— Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA)

Anomaly detection and novelty detection

— One-class SVM

— Isolation Forest

Visualization and dimensionality reduction

— Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

— Kernel PCA

— Locally Linear Embedding (LLE)

— t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE)

Association rule learning

— Apriori

— Eclat

For example, say you have a lot of data about your blog’s visitors. You may want to run a clustering algorithm to try to detect groups of similar visitors. At no point do you tell the algorithm which group a visitor belongs to it finds those connections without your help? For example, it might notice that 40% of your visitors are males who love comic books and generally read your blog in the evening, while 20% are young sci-fi lovers who visit during the weekends. If you use a hierarchical clustering algorithm, it may also subdivide each group into smaller groups. This may help you target your posts for each group.

Visualization algorithms are also good examples of unsupervised learning algorithms: you feed them a lot of complex and unlabeled data, and they output a 2D or 3D representation of your data that can easily be plotted. These algorithms try to preserve as much structure as they can so that you can understand how the data is organized and perhaps identify unsuspected patterns.

Reinforcement Learning: Machine Learning Systems

Reinforcement Learning is a very different beast. The learning system, called an agent in this context, can observe the environment, select and perform actions, and get rewards in return. It must then learn by itself what is the best strategy, called a policy, to get the most reward over time. A policy defines what action the agent should choose when it is in a given situation.

For example, many robots implement Reinforcement Learning algorithms to learn how to walk. DeepMind’s AlphaGo program is also a good example of Reinforcement Learning: it made the headlines in May 2017 when it beat the world champion Ke Jie at the game of Go. It learned its winning policy by analyzing millions of games and then playing many games against itself. Note that learning was turned off during the games against the champion; AlphaGo was just applying the policy it had learned.

Batch and Online Learning: Machine Learning Systems

Another criterion used to classify Machine Learning systems is whether or not the system can learn incrementally from a stream of incoming data.

Batch learning

In batch learning, the system is incapable of learning incrementally: it must be trained using all the available data. This will generally take a lot of time and computing resources, so it is typically done offline. First, the system is trained, and then it is launched into production and runs without learning anymore; it just applies what it has learned. This is called offline learning.

If you want a batch learning system to know about new data (such as a new type of spam), you need to train a new version of the system from scratch on the full dataset (not just the new data, but also the old data), then stop the old system and replace it with the new one. Fortunately, the whole process of training, evaluating, and launching a Machine Learning system can be automated fairly easily, so even a batch learning system can adapt to change. Simply update the data and train a new version of the system from scratch as often as needed.

This solution is simple and often works fine, but training using the full set of data can take many hours, so you would typically train a new system only every 24 hours or even just weekly. If your system needs to adapt to rapidly changing data (e.g., to predict stock prices), then you need a more reactive solution.

Fortunately, a better option in all these cases is to use algorithms that are capable of learning incrementally.

Online learning

In online learning, you train the system incrementally by feeding it data instances sequentially, either individually or in small groups called mini-batches. Each learning step is fast and cheap, so the system can learn about new data on the fly, as it arrives.

Online learning is great for systems that receive data as a continuous flow (e.g., stock prices) and need to adapt to change rapidly or autonomously. It is also a good option if you have limited computing resources: once an online learning system has learned about new data instances, it does not need them anymore, so you can discard them (unless you want to be able to roll back to a previous state and “replay” the data). This can save a huge amount of space.

Also Read: Speech Classification with Machine Learning.

One important parameter of online learning systems is how fast they should adapt to changing data: this is called the learning rate. If you set a high learning rate, then your system will rapidly adapt to new data, but it will also tend to quickly forget the old data (you don’t want a spam filter to flag only the latest kinds of spam it was shown). Conversely, if you set a low learning rate, the system will have more inertia; that is, it will learn more slowly, but it will also be less sensitive to noise in the new data or sequences of nonrepresentative data points (outliers).

A big challenge with online learning is that if bad data is fed to the system, the system’s performance will gradually decline. If it’s a live system, your clients will notice. For example, bad data could come from a malfunctioning sensor on a robot, or from someone spamming a search engine to try to rank high in search results. To reduce this risk, you need to monitor your system closely and promptly switch learning off (and possibly revert to a previously working state) if you detect a drop in performance. You may also want to monitor the input data and react to abnormal data.

Instance-Based Versus Model-Based Learning: Machine Learning Systems

One more way to categorize Machine Learning systems is by how they generalize. Most Machine Learning tasks are about making predictions. This means that given several training examples, the system needs to be able to make good predictions for (generalize to) examples it has never seen before. Having a good performance measure on the training data is good, but insufficient; the true goal is to perform well on new instances.

There are two main approaches to generalization: instance-based learning and model-based learning.

Instance-based learning

Possibly the most trivial form of learning is simply to learn by heart. If you were to create a spam filter this way, it would just flag all emails that are identical to emails that have already been flagged by users—not the worst solution, but certainly not the best.

Instead of just flagging emails that are identical to known spam emails, your spam filter could be programmed to also flag emails that are very similar to known spam emails. This requires a measure of similarity between two emails. A (very basic) similarity measure between two emails could be to count the number of words they have in common. The system would flag an email as spam if it has many words in common with a known spam email.

This is called instance-based learning: the system learns the examples by heart, then generalizes to new cases by using a similarity measure to compare them to the learned examples (or a subset of them).

Model-based learning

Another way to generalize from a set of examples is to build a model of these examples and then use that model to make predictions. This is called model-based learning.

Also Read: 10 Machine Learning Projects to Boost your Portfolio.

So, I hope you liked this article on Types of Machine Learning systems. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.