LM101-013: How to Use Linear Machine Learning Software to Make Predictions (Linear Regression Software)

Hello everyone! Welcome to the thirteenth podcast in the podcast series Learning Machines 101. In this series of podcasts my goal is to discuss important concepts of artificial intelligence and machine learning in hopefully an entertaining and educational manner.

In this episode we will explain how to download and use free machine learning software which can be downloaded from the website: www.learningmachines101.com. Although we will continue to focus on critical theoretical concepts in machine learning in future episodes, it is always useful to actually experience how these concepts work in practice. For these reasons, from time to time I will include special podcasts like this one which focus on very practical issues associated with downloading and installing machine learning software on your computer. If you follow these instructions, by the end of this episode you will have installed one of the simplest (yet most widely used) machine learning algorithms on your computer. You can then use the software to make virtually any kind of prediction you like. However, some of these predictions will be good predictions, while other predictions will be poor predictions. For this reason, following the discussion in Episode 12 which was concerned with the problem of evaluating generalization performance, we will also discuss how to evaluate what your learning machine has “memorized” and additionally evaluate the ability of your learning machine to “generalize” and make predictions about things that it has never seen before.