Machine learning: recent progress in China and beyond

The name ‘machine learning’was coined in 1959 [1], while the most widely quoted formal definition—‘A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E’—was given in the first textbook about machine learning by T. Mitchell in 1997 [2]. Roughly speaking, machine learning aims to enable computers to improve performance by experience. As experience usually appear as data examples, the main focus of machine learning is actually about the study and construction of learning algorithms that are able to build predictive or descriptive models from data. With the increasing demand of computerized data analysis, machine learning becomes more and more important, and stirs up the current artificial intelligence (AI) boom.