Machine Learning

  Why Use Machine Learning? Consider how you would write a spam filter using traditional programming techniques (Figure 1): Figure 1. The traditional approach 1.      First you would consider what spam typically looks like. You might notice that some words or phrases (such as “4U,” “credit card,” “free,” and “amazing”) tend to come up a lot in the subject line. Perhaps you would also notice a few other patterns in the sender’s name, the email’s body, and other parts of the email. 2.      You would write a detection algorithm for each of the patterns that you noticed, and your program would flag emails as spam if a number of these patterns were detected. 3.      You would test your program and repeat steps 1 and 2 until it was good enough to launch.   Since the problem is difficult , your program will likely become a long list of complex rules — pretty hard to maintain. In contrast, a spam filt...