Why is Machine Learning Important?

• Some tasks cannot be defined well, except by examples (e.g., recognizing people).
• Relationships and correlations can be hidden within large amounts of data. Machine Learning/Data Mining may be able to find these relationships.
• Human designers often produce machines that do not work as well as desired in the environments in which they are used.
• The amount of knowledge available about certain tasks might be too large for explicit encoding by humans (e.g., medical diagnostic).
• Environments change over time.
• New knowledge about tasks is constantly being discovered by humans. It may be difficult to continuously re-design systems “by hand”.