What is AI (Artificial Intelligence):
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that focuses
on creating machines or software that can think, learn, and perform
tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI enables computers
to solve problems, recognize patterns, make decisions, and even
understand natural language.
Some of the examples of statistical techniques that are used for
developing AI applications and are still in practice are listed here:
Regression
Classification
Clustering
Probability Theories
Decision Trees
If you are developing AI applications based on limited data, you
would be using these statistical techniques. However, today the data
is abundant. To analyze the kind of huge data that we possess
statistical techniques are of not much help as they have some
limitations of their own. More advanced methods such as deep
learning are hence developed to solve many complex problems.
Examples of AI
Chatbots (like ChatGPT) – AI-powered assistants that can answer
questions, provide recommendations, and have conversations.
Face Recognition (Face ID) – AI helps recognize and verify faces for
security purposes in smartphones and surveillance systems.
Google Search & Recommendations – AI helps Google suggest
search results, YouTube recommends videos, and Netflix suggests
movies based on user preferences.
Self-Driving Cars – AI allows cars to detect obstacles, follow traffic
rules, and drive without human intervention.
What is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that
enables computers to learn from data and make decisions without
being explicitly programmed. Instead of following fixed rules, ML
algorithms identify patterns in data and improve their performance
over time.
Consider the following figure that shows a plot of house prices versus
its size in sq. ft.
After plotting various data points on the XY plot, we draw a best-fit
line to do our predictions for any other house given its size. You will
feed the known data to the machine and ask it to find the best fit
line. Once the best fit line is found by the machine, you will test its
suitability by feeding in a known house size, i.e. the Y-value in the
above curve. The machine will now return the estimated X-value, i.e.
the expected price of the house. The diagram can be extrapolated to
find out the price of a house which is 3000 sq. ft. or even larger. This
is called regression in statistics. Particularly, this kind of regression is
called linear regression as the relationship between X & Y data points
is linear.
In many cases, the relationship between the X & Y data points may
not be a straight line, and it may be a curve with a complex equation.
Your task would be now to find out the best fitting curve which can
be extrapolated to predict the future values. One such application
plot is shown in the figure below.
You will use the statistical optimization techniques to find out the
equation for the best fit curve here. And this is what exactly Machine
Learning is about. You use known optimization techniques to find the
best solution to your problem.
Example of Machine Learning
Spam Email Detection
Email services like Gmail use machine learning to automatically
detect spam emails. The ML model analyzes past emails marked as
spam and learns patterns like specific words, sender addresses, and
message formats. When a new email arrives, the model predicts
whether it is spam or not.
Self-Driving Cars
Self-driving cars use ML to recognize traffic signs, pedestrians, and
other vehicles. By learning from thousands of driving scenarios, the
system makes decisions like stopping at red lights and changing lanes
safely.
Voice Assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant)
These assistants use ML to understand speech, recognize commands,
and improve responses over time based on user interactions.
Difference Between AI and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Feature Machine Learning (ML)
(AI)
AI is a broad field that ML is a subset of AI that
enables machines to focuses on training machines
Definition
mimic human to learn from data and
intelligence. improve automatically.
To create smart To develop algorithms that can
Goal systems that can think learn from data and make
and act like humans. predictions.
Includes ML, deep
A specific AI technique that
learning, robotics,
allows machines to learn from
Scope natural language
data without explicit
processing (NLP), and
programming.
more.
Example AI-powered chatbots, Email spam detection,
self-driving cars, and recommendation systems, and
Artificial Intelligence
Feature Machine Learning (ML)
(AI)
robotics. facial recognition.
Does it No, some AI systems
Yes, ML always learns from
always learn are rule-based (e.g.,
data to improve accuracy.
from data? expert systems).
Simple Analogy
AI is like a teacher who knows everything and can solve
different problems.
ML is like a student who learns from examples and improves
over time.
Machine Learning – Categories of Machine Learning
Machine learning evolved from left to right as shown in the above
diagram.
Initially, researchers started out with Supervised Learning. This
is the case of housing price prediction discussed earlier.
This was followed by unsupervised learning, where the machine
is made to learn on its own without any supervision.
Scientists discovered further that it may be a good idea to
reward the machine when it does the job the expected way and
there came the Reinforcement Learning.
Very soon, the data that is available these days has become so
humongous that the conventional techniques developed so far
failed to analyze the big data and provide us the predictions.
Thus, came the deep learning where the human brain is
simulated in the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) created in our
binary computers.
The machine now learns on its own using the high computing
power and huge memory resources that are available today.
It is now observed that Deep Learning has solved many of the
previously unsolvable problems.
The technique is now further advanced by giving incentives to
Deep Learning networks as awards and there finally comes
Deep Reinforcement Learning.
