Machine Learning Onramp Overview

There’s a lot of hype about machine learning, but what is it and why is it such a big deal?

At a really high level, machine learning is a collection of techniques for extracting information from data. Like using someone’s purchasing history to detect credit card fraud. Or using the state of some equipment to predict when it will need maintenance. Or using the position of a pen on a tablet through time to determine what was being written.

In this course you’ll learn about building classification models. Classification is when you want to put an observation into one of a discrete set of classes, like cat, dog, or penguin. A model is just a mathematical recipe that turns data into one of the output classes.

In a traditional modeling approach, you’d have to think up that recipe yourself, using knowledge of how the system works. But a lot of real-world problems are just too complicated for that to work. With machine learning, you build the model from data instead. Apply a machine learning algorithm to real data and let the machine “learn” from those examples how to map the inputs to the desired outputs.

In this course you’ll use the handwriting example to learn the whole classification workflow. You’ll import the data, clean it up, extract information from it, and then use that information to build a model that can accurately predict the letter that was written.

To get started, all you need is a web browser. You’ll interact with a web-based version of MATLAB, where you’ll receive step-by-step instructions and instant feedback. You can also experiment and try things out on your own.

You don't need to learn a lot of theory to start doing practical machine learning. But it will help if you know a little bit of MATLAB—just the basics. If you've never used MATLAB before, it's easy to get started, and we recommend you first take MATLAB Onramp to get you up to speed quickly.

This course should take about two hours to complete, but you can leave anytime and come back later.

And when you’re done, you can download a shareable certificate of completion.

Click the “Launch the course” button to get started today!