Getting Started with Supervised Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a buzzword that is added to products and services to make them more appealing, and more often than not, it's a marketing strategy rather than a technical achievement. Most of the time, AI is used as an umbrella term to describe anything from simple analytics to advanced learning algorithms. It's something that sells, as most of the population does not have much knowledge about it, but intuitively everyone now understands that it is something that will change the world we live in.

Luckily, it's not just hype, and we have seen many astonishing achievements made by AI, such as Tesla's self-driving cars. Using recent research into deep neural networks, Tesla managed to create a functionality and made it available to the masses much quicker than most of the experts predicted.

In this book, we will try to steer away from the hype and focus on the actual value that AI can provide, starting from the basics in order to rapidly ramp up to the most recent algorithms.

This chapter will cover the following topics in detail:

  • History of AI
  • An overview of machine learning
  • Environment setup
  • Supervised learning in practice with Python
  • Feature engineering
  • Supervised learning algorithms