Basic Machine Learning

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Overview

Questions

• What is machine learning?
• How is machine learning used in biomedical studies?

Objectives

• Describe how machine learning is used in biomedical science.

Introduction

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Machine learning is a very broad topic and a highly active research area. In the life sciences, much of what is described as “precision medicine” is an application of machine learning to biomedical data. The general idea is to predict or discover outcomes from measured predictors. Can we discover new types of cancer from gene expression profiles? Can we predict drug response from a series of genotypes? Here we give a very brief introduction to two major machine learning components: clustering and class prediction. There are many good resources to learn more about machine learning, for example the excellent textbook The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman. A free PDF of this book can be found here.

Key Points

• Machine learning predicts outcomes from data.
• As examples, machine learning can be used to discover new kinds of cancers or predict drug response in biomedical studies.