Toptal

One of the main tasks of computers is to automate human tasks. Some of these tasks are simple and repetitive, such as “move X from A to B.” It gets far more interesting when the computer has to make decisions about problems that are far more difficult to formalize. That is where we start to encounter basic machine learning problems.

Historically, such algorithms were built by scientists or experts that had intimate knowledge of their field and were largely based on rules. With the explosion of computing power and the availability of large and diverse data sets, the focus has shifted toward a more computational approach.

Most popularized machine learning concepts these days have to do with neural networks, and in my experience, this created the impression in many people that neural networks are some kind of a miracle weapon for all inference problems. Actually, this is quite far

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