Practical use cases for machine learning algorithms

3
votes

I am just starting out studying machine learning and currently doing Andrew Ng's course on Coursera. I am going through the course but am a bit lost. It will make studying all those algorithms/theory a lot rewarding if I can see some use cases for them.

For example, the first topic I read about was gradient descent and then linear regression and logistic regression. Are these used directly in practice or are other algorithms like k-means and kernel density used? I guess I am trying to get real world (software engineering, data mining) examples of these topics. Can some one suggest a post that might have some explanation of any machine learning algorithm(s) usage? It will be greatly helpful.

1
algorithmmachine-learningartificial-intelligencek-means
Even some "simple" ones are used since they can be a lot faster. Fast machine learning is nice when you have lots of data or time limitations. Practical use cases in general isn't very hard to find these days. - keyser
There are books written on this subject. Yes, all the methods that you mention are used in practice as well as in theory. - Gordon Linoff
I am really a novice and have no concept of "simple" or "complex" algorithms. I am really trying to just get a sense of how any of these are used. Can you suggest a few practical use cases? - user220201
Movie recommendations/recommendations of any kind, scanning hand written text, scanning faces, spelling correction, diagnosis (of any kind), etc etc. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg - keyser
Which algorithms are used for these specific examples? The ones you have mentioned are enough for me if you can talk about the algorithms used for those. I will go inside the iceberg by myself :) - user220201

1 Answers

7
votes

NO FREE LUNCH THEOREM states that if algorithm A outperforms algorithm B for some problem, then loosely speaking there must exist exactly as many other problems where B outperforms. So, it is difficult to link algorithm with particular use case.
If you are looking only for use cases where you can use machine learning algorithms, visit https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/DataScienceUseCases

Update : Just now, i came across http://pkghosh.wordpress.com Check it out. (use cases with algorithms)