Ref: Coursera - University of Washington Machine Learning Course.

Link to the course: Link.

ROUGH NOTES (!)
Updated: 03/06/26

MACHINE LEARNING

We will consider

MACHINE LEARNING: CASE STUDIES

[Machine learning is changing the world]

Old view of ML

Data -> ML Algorithm -> “My curve is better than your curve” -> Write a paper.

Disruptive companies (Companies that take a market and completely change it) are often differentiated by INTELLIGENT APPLICATIONS using Machine Learning.

Eg: In the early days, Amazon disrupted the retail market by bringing in product recommendations into their website.

Eg: Google disrupted the advertising market by doing really targeted advertising, using ML to figure out what people would click on.

Eg: Netflix, the movie distribution company, changed how we watch movies. (We don’t go to a shop and rent movies anymore, we go to the web and stream data.) At the core, there is a recommender system that helps me find the movies that I like, out of the many, many thousands of movies they are serving.

Eg: Consider Pandora, a music recommendation system.

Eg: Consider Facebook. It connects me with people who I might want to be friends with.

Eg: Consider Uber. It disrupted the taxi industry by optimizing how to connect drivers with people in real time.

We will get ready to build intelligent applications like these.

The machine learning pipeline

Data -> ML Method -> Intelligence.

By Intelligence, we mean things like: What product am I likely to buy right now?