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10 Top Machine Learning Algorithms & Their Use-Cases

Machine learning is arguably responsible for data science and artificial intelligence’s most prominent and visible use cases. In this article, learn about machine learning, some of its prominent use cases and algorithms, and how you can get started.
Updated Feb 2024  · 15 min read

Machine learning is arguably responsible for data science and artificial intelligence’s most prominent and visible use cases. From Tesla’s self-driving cars to DeepMind’s AlphaFold algorithm, machine-learning-based solutions have produced awe-inspiring results and generated considerable hype. But what exactly is machine learning? How does it work? And most importantly, is it worth the hype? This article provides an intuitive definition of key machine-learning algorithms, outlines some of their key applications, and provides resources for how to get started with machine learning

What is Machine Learning?

In a nutshell, machine learning is a sub-field of artificial intelligence in which computers provide predictions based on patterns learned directly from data without being explicitly programmed to do so. You’ll notice in this definition that machine learning is a sub-field of artificial intelligence. As such, let’s break definitions down into more detail, as oftentimes, terms such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and even data science are used interchangeably. 

Artificial Intelligence

One of the best definitions of artificial intelligence comes from Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain and former Chief Scientist at Baidu. According to Andrew, artificial intelligence is a “huge set of tools of making computers behave intelligently.” This can include anything ranging from explicitly defined systems like calculators to machine learning-based solutions like spam email detectors. 

Machine Learning

As outlined above, machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence in which algorithms learn patterns from historical data and provide predictions based on these learned patterns by applying them to new data. Traditionally, simple, intelligent systems like calculators are explicitly programmed by developers as clearly defined steps and procedures (i.e., if this, then that). However, this isn’t scalable or possible for more advanced problems. 

Let’s take the example of email spam filters. Developers can try and create spam filters by explicitly defining them. For example, they can define a program that triggers a spam filter if an email has a certain subject line or contains certain links. However, this system will prove ineffective as soon as spammers change tactics. 

On the other hand, a machine learning-based solution will take in millions of spam emails as input data, learn the most common characteristics of spammy emails through statistical association, and make predictions on future emails based on the learned characteristics. 

Deep Learning

Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning and is probably responsible for popular culture's most visible machine learning use cases. Deep learning algorithms are inspired by the structure of the human brain and require incredible amounts of data for training. They are often used for the most complex “cognitive” problems, such as speech detection, language translation, self-driving cars, and more. Check out our comparison of deep learning vs machine learning for more context. 

Data Science

In contrast to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, data science has quite a broad definition. In a nutshell, data science is all about extracting value and insights from data. That value could be in the form of predictive models that use machine learning, but it could also mean surfacing insights with a dashboard or report. Read more about the daily tasks of data scientists in this article.  

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Outside of email spam detection, some commonly known machine learning applications include customer segmentation based on demographic data (sales and marketing), stock price prediction (finance), claims approval automation (insurance), content recommendations based on viewing history (media & entertainment), and much more. Machine learning has become ubiquitous and finds varied applications in our day-to-day lives. 

At the end of this article, we will share many resources to get you started with machine learning. 

The Different Types of Machine Learning

Now that we’ve given an overview of machine learning and where it fits within other buzzwords you may encounter in this space, let’s take a deeper look into the different types of machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are broadly categorized into supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, and self-supervised learning. Let us understand them in greater detail and their most common use cases. 

Supervised Machine Learning

Most machine learning use cases revolve around algorithms learning patterns from historical data and applying them to new data in the form of predictions. This is often referred to as supervised learning. Supervised learning algorithms are shown both historical inputs and outputs on a particular problem we’re trying to solve, where inputs are essentially features or dimensions of the observation we’re trying to predict, and where outputs are the outcomes we want to predict. Let’s illustrate this with our spam detection example. 

In the spam detection use case, a supervised learning algorithm would be trained on a dataset of spammy emails. The inputs would be features or dimensions about the emails, such as the email subject line, the sender's email address, the contents of the email, whether the email contained dangerous-looking links, and other relevant information that could give clues about whether an email is spammy.

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The output would be whether, in fact, that email was spam or not. During the model learning phase, the algorithm learns a function to map the statistical relationship between the set of input variables (the different dimensions of spammy email) and the output variable (whether it was spam or not). This functional mapping is then used to predict the output of the previously unseen data.

There are broadly two types of supervised learning use cases:

  • Regression: Regression use cases are when we try to predict a continuous outcome that falls within a range. A good example would be house price prediction based on the square footage of the house, where it’s located, the number of bedrooms, and other relevant dimensions. 
  • Classification: Classification use cases are when we try to classify whether an outcome falls within two or more categories. Spam detectors are classification models (either spam or not spam) — but other classification use cases include customer churn prediction (will churn or not churn), identifying cars in pictures (multiple categories), and more. 

In an upcoming section, we’ll look into specific supervised learning algorithms and some of their use cases in more detail. 

Unsupervised Machine Learning

Instead of learning patterns that map inputs to outputs, unsupervised learning algorithms discover general patterns in data without being explicitly shown outputs. Unsupervised learning algorithms are commonly used to group and cluster different objects and entities. A great example of unsupervised learning is customer segmentation. Companies often have a variety of customer personas that they serve. Organizations often want to have a fact-based approach to identifying their customer segments to serve them better. Enter unsupervised learning. 

In this use case, an unsupervised learning algorithm would learn group customers based on various attributes, such as the number of times they used a product, their demographics, how they interact with products, and more. Then, the same algorithm can predict which likely segment new customers belong to based on the same dimensions. 

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Unsupervised algorithms are also used to reduce the dimensions in a dataset (i.e., the number of features) by using dimensionality reduction techniques. These algorithms are often used as an intermediary step in training a supervised learning algorithm. 

A big tradeoff data scientists often face when training machine learning algorithms is performance vs. predictive accuracy. Generally, the more information they have about a particular problem, the better. However, that could also lead to slow training times and performance. Dimensionality reduction techniques help reduce the number of features present within a dataset without sacrificing predictive value.  

Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning algorithms that utilize rewards to promote a desired behavior or prediction and a penalty otherwise. While relatively still a research area within machine learning, reinforcement learning is responsible for algorithms that exceed human-level intelligence in games such as Chess, Go, and more. 

It is a behavioral modeling technique where the model learns through a trial and error mechanism as it keeps interacting with the environment. Let’s illustrate that with the chess example. At a high level, a reinforcement learning algorithm (often named agent) is provided an environment (chess board) where it can make a variety of decisions (play moves). 

Each move has a set of associated scores, a reward for actions that lead the agent to win, and a penalty for moves that lead the agent to lose. 

The agent keeps interacting with the environment to learn the actions that reap the most rewards and keeps repeating those actions. This repetition of promoted behavior is called the exploitation phase. When the agent looks for new avenues to earn rewards, this is called the exploration phase. More generally, this is referred to as the exploration-exploitation paradigm.

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Self-Supervised Machine Learning

Self-supervised learning is a data-efficient machine learning technique where the model learns from an unlabeled sample dataset. As shown in the example below, the first model is fed some unlabelled input images, which are clustered by it using features generated from these images. 

Some of these examples would have a high confidence of belonging to the clusters while others don’t. The second step uses the high-confidence labeled data from the first step to train a classifier that tends to be more powerful than a one-step clustering approach.

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The difference between self-supervised and supervised algorithms is that the classified output in the former still won’t have the classes mapped to real objects. It differs from supervised learning as it does not depend on the manually labeled set and generates labels by itself, hence the name self-learning.

Below, we’ve outlined some of the top machine learning algorithms and their most common use cases.

Top Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms

1. Linear Regression

A simple algorithm models a linear relationship between one or more explanatory variables and a continuous numerical output variable. It is faster to train as compared to other machine learning algorithms. Its biggest advantage lies in its ability to explain and interpret the model predictions. It is a regression algorithm used to predict outcomes like customer lifecycle value, housing prices, and stock prices.

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You can learn more about it in this essentials of linear regression in Python tutorial. If you are interested in getting hands-on with regression analysis, this much sought-after course on DataCamp is the right resource for you. 

2. Decision Trees

A decision tree algorithm is a tree-like structure of decision rules that are applied to the input features to predict the possible outcomes. It can be used for classification or regression. Decision tree predictions provide a good aid for healthcare experts as it is straightforward to interpret how those predictions are made.

You can refer to this tutorial if you are interested in learning how to build a decision tree classifier using Python. Further, if you are more comfortable using R, then you will benefit from this tutorial. There is also a comprehensive decision trees course on DataCamp. 

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3. Random Forest

It is arguably one of the most popular algorithms and builds upon the drawbacks of overfitting prominently seen in the decision tree models. Overfitting is when algorithms are trained on the training data a bit too well, and where they fail to generalize or provide accurate predictions on unseen data. Random forest solves the problem of overfitting by building multiple decision trees on randomly selected samples from the data. The final outcome in the form of the best prediction is derived from the majority voting of all the trees in the forest. 

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It is used for classification and regression problems both. It finds application in feature selection, disease detection, etc. You can learn more about tree-based models and ensembles (combining different individual models) from this very popular course on DataCamp. You can also learn more in this Python-based tutorial on implementing the random forest model.

4. Support Vector Machines

Support Vector Machines, commonly known as SVM, are generally used for classification problems. As shown in the example below, an SVM finds a hyperplane (line in this case), which segregates the two classes (red and green) and maximizes the margin (distance between the dotted lines) between them. 

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SVM is generally used for classification problems but can also be employed in regression problems. It is used to classify news articles and handwriting recognition. You can read more about the different types of kernel tricks along with the python implementation in this scikit-learn SVM tutorial. You can also follow this tutorial, where you’ll replicate the SVM implementation in R 

5. Gradient Boosting Regressor

Gradient Boosting Regression is an ensemble model that combines several weak learners to make a robust predictive model. It is good at handling non-linearities in the data and multicollinearity issues. 

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If you are in a ride sharing business and need to predict the ride fare amount, then you can use a gradient boosting regressor. If you want to understand the different flavors of gradient boosting, then you can watch this video on DataCamp. 

Top Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms

6. K-means Clustering

K-Means is the most widely used clustering approach—it determines K clusters based on Euclidean distance. It is a very popular algorithm for customer segmentation and recommendation systems.

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This tutorial is a great resource for learning more about K-means clustering.

7. Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a statistical procedure that is used to summarize the information from a large data set by projecting it to a lower dimensional subspace. It is also called a dimensionality reduction technique that ensures retaining the essential parts of the data with higher information.

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From this tutorial, you can practice hands-on PCA implementation on two popular datasets, Breast Cancer and CIFAR-10.

8. Hierarchical Clustering

It is a bottom-up approach where each data point is treated as its own cluster, and then the closest two clusters are merged together iteratively. Its biggest advantage over K-means clustering is that it does not require the user to specify the expected number of clusters at the onset. It finds application in document clustering based on similarity.

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You can learn various unsupervised learning techniques, such as hierarchical clustering and K-means clustering, using the scipy library from this course at DataCamp. Besides, you can also learn how to apply clustering techniques to generate insights from unlabeled data using R from this course.

9. Gaussian Mixture Models

It is a probabilistic model for modeling normally distributed clusters within a dataset. It is different from the standard clustering algorithms in the sense that it estimates the probability of an observation belonging to a particular cluster and then dives into making inferences about its sub-population. 

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You can find a one-stop collation of courses here that covers fundamental concepts in model-based clustering, the structure of Mixture Models, and beyond. You will also get to practice hands-on gaussian mixture modeling using flexmix package.

10. Apriori Algorithm

A rule-based approach that identifies the most frequent itemset in a given dataset where prior knowledge of frequent itemset properties is used. Market basket analysis employs this algorithm to help behemoths like Amazon and Netflix in translating the heaps of information about their users into simple rules of product recommendations. It analyses the associations between millions of products and uncovers insightful rules. 

DataCamp provides a comprehensive course in both the languages—Python and R.

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How to learn Machine Learning

Machine learning is not just a buzzword anymore. Many organizations are deploying machine learning models and are already realizing gains from predictive insights. Needless to say, there is a lot of demand for highly-skilled machine learning practitioners in the market. Below, you will find a list of resources that can quickly get you started in upskilling machine learning concepts is shared below:

FAQs

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning is a sub-field of artificial intelligence where computers make predictions based on patterns learned from data without being explicitly programmed.

What is the most commonly used Machine Learning Algorithm?

The most commonly used machine learning algorithm varies based on the application and data specifics, but Linear Regression, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression are among the most frequently utilized due to their simplicity, interpretability, and efficiency across a wide range of problems.

How do I know which Machine Learning Algorithm to use?

Choosing the right Machine Learning algorithm depends on the problem type (classification, regression, clustering, etc.), data size, quality, and feature types. Start with simpler models like Linear Regression for numerical predictions or Logistic Regression for binary classification. For complex patterns, consider Neural Networks. Ensemble methods like Random Forests can improve prediction accuracy. Experimentation and cross-validation are key to finding the best algorithm for your specific tas

What are Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms?

Supervised learning algorithms learn from labeled data, making predictions based on historical data and applying these to new data.

What are Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms?

Unsupervised learning algorithms find patterns or groupings in data without needing labeled examples.

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement Learning is a type of Machine Learning where algorithms learn to make decisions by receiving rewards or penalties.

What is Self-Supervised Learning?

Self-Supervised Learning is where models learn from unlabeled data, creating its own supervision through the learning process.

What is Linear Regression used for?

Linear Regression is used to model the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables, useful for predicting outcomes like sales or housing prices.

How does a Decision Tree work?

A Decision Tree makes decisions based on the data's features, splitting the data into branches to predict the outcome.

What is Random Forest?

Random Forest is an ensemble learning method for classification and regression that operates by constructing multiple decision trees

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