When I was a kid I was big into cars. This went from matchbox eventually building a full radio controlled car of my own. I built it from scratch in a kit that seemed to have a million pieces.
I didn’t have any help. I read the instructions thoroughly and put the whole car together. It took a while and I almost couldn’t believe it when I was done because there seemed to be an unlimited number of pieces.
That was a great experience for me but I didn’t truly understand the most valuable lesson until years later – I could teach myself.
Since that lesson, I’ve continued to teach myself and it has been a tremendously valuable skill that most of us probably take for granted.
So where am I going with this?
Well, if you understand this concept then you’ll understand what’s called unsupervised learning as a category of machine learning.
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The way it works is the machine is given data (car parts) and it learns to group the data into categories, put it together and share with us the result (car). The machine teaches itself.
But what application does this technology have?
Well, VISA has leveraged a version of this technology to help with fraud detection and saved $25B in 2019 alone.
Sounds pretty valuable to me.