Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions. Besides CS and AI, it has strong ties to statistics and optimization, which deliver both methods and theory to the field. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit, rule-based algorithms is infeasible. Example applications include spam filtering, optical character recognition (OCR), search engines and computer vision. Machine...