After we understand the type of machine learning problem we are working with, we can think about the type of data to collect and the types of machine learning algorithms we can try. In this post we take a tour of the most popular machine learning algorithms. It is useful to tour the main algorithms to get a general idea of what methods are available.
There are so many algorithms available. The difficulty is that there are classes of method and there are extensions to methods and it quickly becomes very difficult to determine what constitutes a canonical algorithm. In this post I want to give you two ways to think about and categorize the algorithms you may come across in the field.
The first is a grouping of algorithms by the learning style. The second is a grouping of algorithms by similarity in form or function (like grouping similar animals together). Both approaches are useful.
Learning Style
There are different ways an algorithm can model a problem based on its interaction with the experience or environment or whatever we want to call the input data. It is popular in machine learning and artificial intelligence text books to first consider the learning styles that an algorithm can adopt.
