Machine learning is a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Arthur Samuel , an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence, coined the term "Machine Learning" in 1959 while at IBM Machine learning is closely related to (and often overlaps with) computational statistics , which also focuses on prediction-making through the use of computers. It has strong ties to mathematical optimization , which delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field. Machine learning is sometimes conflated with data mining , where the latter subfield focuses more on exploratory data analysis and is known as unsupervised learning . Within the field of data analytics , machine learning is a method used to devise complex models and algorithms that lend themselves to prediction; in commercial use, this is known as...