Types of Machine Learning Systems:

There are so many different types of Machine Learning systems that is:

1. Supervised Learning
2. Unsupervised Learning
3. Semi-supervised learning
4. Reinforcement Learning
5. Batch learning
6. Online learning
7. Instance-based learning
8. Model-based learning

Let’s discuss each of them in detail:

1. Supervised Learning:

In supervised learning, the training data you feed to the algorithm includes the desired solutions, called labels.

A typical supervised learning task is classification. The spam filter is a good example of this: it is trained with many example emails along with their class (spam or ham), and it must learn how to classify new emails.

Another typical task is to predict a target numeric value, such as the price of a car, given a set of features (mileage, age, brand, etc.) called predictors. This sort of task is called regression. To train the system, you need to give it many examples of cars, including both their predictors and their labels (i.e., their prices).

Here are some of the most important supervised learning algorithms:

• k-Nearest Neighbors
• Linear Regression
• Logistic Regression
• Support Vector Machines (SVMs)
• Decision Trees and Random Forests
• Neural networks

2. Unsupervised Learning:

In unsupervised learning, as you might guess, the training data is un-labelled. The system tries to learn without a teacher.

Here are some of the most important unsupervised learning algorithms:

• Clustering:

— K-Means

— DBSCAN

— Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA)

• Anomaly detection and novelty detection:

— One-class SVM

— Isolation Forest

• Visualization and dimensionality reduction:

— Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

— Kernel PCA

— Locally-Linear Embedding (LLE)

— t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE)

• Association rule learning:
• — Apriori
• — Eclat

3. Semi-supervised learning:

Some algorithms can deal with partially labelled training data, usually a lot of unlabelled data and a little bit of labelled data. This is called semi-supervised learning.

Some photo-hosting services, such as Google Photos, are good examples of this. Once you upload all your family photos to the service, it automatically recognizes that the same person A shows up in photos 1, 5, and 11, while another person B shows up in photos 2, 5, and 7. This is the unsupervised part of the algorithm (clustering). Now all the system needs is for you to tell it who these people are. Just one label per person, and it is able to name everyone in every photo, which is useful for searching photos.

Most semi-supervised learning algorithms are combinations of unsupervised and supervised algorithms. For example, deep belief networks (DBNs) are based on unsupervised components called restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) stacked on top of one another. RBMs are trained sequentially in an unsupervised manner, and then the whole system is fine-tuned using supervised learning techniques.

4. Reinforcement Learning:

Reinforcement Learning is a very different beast. The learning system, called an agent in this context, can observe the environment, select and perform actions, and get rewards in return (or penalties in the form of negative rewards). It must then learn by itself what is the best strategy, called a policy, to get the most reward over time. A policy defines what action the agent should choose when it is in a given situation.

For example, many robots implement Reinforcement Learning algorithms to learn how to walk. DeepMind’s AlphaGo program is also a good example of Reinforcement Learning: it made the headlines in May 2017 when it beat the world champion Ke Jie at the game of Go. It learned its winning policy by analysing millions of games, and then playing many games against itself. Note that learning was turned off during the games against the champion; AlphaGo was just applying the policy it had learned.

5. Batch learning:

In batch learning, the system is incapable of learning incrementally: it must be trained using all the available data. This will generally take a lot of time and computing resources, so it is typically done offline. First the system is trained, and then it is launched into production and runs without learning anymore; it just applies what it has learned. This is called offline learning.

If you want a batch learning system to know about new data (such as a new type of spam), you need to train a new version of the system from scratch on the full dataset (not just the new data, but also the old data), then stop the old system and replace it with the new one.

This solution is simple and often works fine, but training using the full set of data can take many hours, so you would typically train a new system only every 24 hours or even just weekly. If your system needs to adapt to rapidly changing data (e.g., to predict stock prices), then you need a more reactive solution.

Also, training on the full set of data requires a lot of computing resources (CPU, memory space, disk space, disk I/O, network I/O, etc.). If you have a lot of data and you automate your system to train from scratch every day, it will end up costing you a lot of money. If the amount of data is huge, it may even be impossible to use a batch learning algorithm.

Fortunately, a better option in all these cases is to use algorithms that are capable of learning incrementally.

6. Online learning:

In online learning, you train the system incrementally by feeding it data instances sequentially, either individually or by small groups called mini-batches. Each learning step is fast and cheap, so the system can learn about new data on the fly, as it arrives Online learning is great for systems that receive data as a continuous flow (e.g., stock prices) and need to adapt to change rapidly or autonomously.

It is also a good option if you have limited computing resources: once an online learning system has learned about new data instances, it does not need them anymore, so you can discard them (unless you want to be able to roll back to a previous state and “replay” the data). This can save a huge amount of space.

Online learning algorithms can also be used to train systems on huge datasets that cannot fit in one machine’s main memory (this is called out-of-core learning). The algorithm loads part of the data, runs a training step on that data, and repeats the process until it has run on all of the data.

Out-of-core learning is usually done offline (i.e., not on the live system), so online learning can be a confusing name. Think of it as incremental learning.

One important parameter of online learning systems is how fast they should adapt to changing data: this is called the learning rate. If you set a high learning rate, then your system will rapidly adapt to new data, but it will also tend to quickly forget the old data (you don’t want a spam filter to flag only the latest kinds of spam it was shown). Conversely, if you set a low learning rate, the system will have more inertia; that is, it will learn more slowly, but it will also be less sensitive to noise in the new data or to sequences of nonrepresentative data points (outliers).

Instance-Based Versus Model-Based Learning:

One more way to categorize Machine Learning systems is by how they generalize. Most Machine Learning tasks are about making predictions. This means that given a number of training examples, the system needs to be able to generalize to examples it has never seen before. Having a good performance measure on the training data is good, but insufficient; the true goal is to perform well on new instances.

There are two main approaches to generalization: instance-based learning and model-based learning.

7. Instance-based learning:

Possibly the most trivial form of learning is simply to learn by heart. If you were to create a spam filter this way, it would just flag all emails that are identical to emails that have already been flagged by users — not the worst solution, but certainly not the best.

Instead of just flagging emails that are identical to known spam emails, your spam filter could be programmed to also flag emails that are very similar to known spam emails. This requires a measure of similarity between two emails. A (very basic) similarity measure between two emails could be to count the number of words they have in common. The system would flag an email as spam if it has many words in common with a known spam email.

This is called instance-based learning: the system learns the examples by heart, then generalizes to new cases by comparing them to the learned examples (or a subset of them), using a similarity measure. For example, in the new instance would be classified as a triangle because the majority of the most similar instances belong to that class.

8. Model-based learning:

Another way to generalize from a set of examples is to build a model of these examples, then use that model to make predictions. This is called model-based learning.