5.1. Introduction to machine learning

A formal definition of ML is:

A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E. -Tom Mitchell<sup>1</sup> (1998)

Neural networks are one such machine learning algorithm. This sub-section will briefly cover the two broad categories of machine learning algorithms. Bear in mind that this chapter will elaborate on neural networks used in a supervised learning setting.
