machine learning

Imagine you want to teach a computer to identify cats in pictures. Instead of writing millions of lines of code describing every possible cat feature, you show the computer lots and lots of pictures, some with cats and some without. Machine learning is the process where the computer 'learns' from this data, identifying patterns and rules on its own to tell a cat apart. It's like teaching by example rather than giving exact instructions. This 'learning' often involves using statistical methods to build models that can make predictions or decisions.