Machine Learning (ML) asks "how can we design programs that automatically improve their performance through experience?" This includes learning to perform many types of tasks based on many types of experience, e.g. spotting high-risk medical patients, recognizing speech, classifying text documents, detecting credit card fraud, or driving autonomous robots.
Topics covered in 10-601A include concept learning, version spaces, decision trees, neural networks, computational learning theory, active learning, estimation & the bias-variance tradeoff, hypothesis testing, Bayesian learning, the Minimum Description Length principle, the Gibbs classifier, Naïve Bayes classifier, Bayes Nets & Graphical Models, the EM algorithm, Hidden Markov Models, K-Nearest-Neighbors and nonparametric learning, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, bagging and boosting.