Descriptive Analytics
Make use of data aggregation and data mining to provide insight into the past and answer: “What has happened?”
Predictive Analytics
Make use of statistical models and forecasts techniques to understand the future and answer: “What could or will happen?”
Prescriptive Analytics
Make use of optimisation and simulation algorithms to advice on possible outcomes and answer: “What should we do?” or "How can we make it happen?"
[Machine Learning is the] field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.
Arthur Samuel, 1959
The problem of a rule-based system against an evolving world. E.g., Spam filtering
Set rules versus ML
ML is great for:
Problems the requires a lot of hand-tuning or long list of rules
Complex problems
Evolving environment: Adapts to new data
Pattern discovery / Provides insights
Supervised
Regression
Linear Regression, Penalised Methods, Tree-based
Classification
Logistic Regression, Tree-based, Bagging, Boosting
Unsupervised
Clustering
Visualisation / Dimensionality Reduction
Association rule learning
Semi-supervised
Reinforcement Learning
Source: deeplearning4j
Frame the problem and look at the big picture.
Get the data.
Explore the data to gain insights.
Prepare the data to better expose the underlying data patterns to Machine Learning algorithms.
Explore many different models and short-list the best ones.
Fine-tune your models and combine them into a great solution.
Present your solution.
Launch, monitor, and maintain your system.
Source: Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems By Aurélien Géron