2 MACHINE LEARNING, STATISTICS, AND DATA ANALYTICS

We saw in the previous chapter that we use machine learning when we believe there is a relationship between the observations of interest but do not know how. Because we do not know its exact form, we cannot just go ahead and write down the computer program. So our approach is to collect data of example observations and to analyze it to discover the relationship. Now, let us discuss further what we mean by a relationship and how we extract it from data; as always, it is a good idea to use an example to make the discussion concrete.