Machine learning provides the intelligence underlying fields sometimes known as big data analytics, data science, and data mining.

Machine learning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with developing computer programs and systems that learn and make predictions from data. Machine learning systems have shown great success in tasks as varied as recognizing objects in images, understanding speech, interpreting natural language texts, classifying documents by content, guiding robots in unfamiliar environments, making product and movie recommendations to consumers, predicting disease outbreaks, inferring social relationships from communication patterns, and anticipating human errors.   

Machine learning methods are widely used in engineering and natural science fields to interpret and model data, and increasingly in the social sciences as well.