All intelligent life forms instinctively model their surrounding environment in order to actively navigate through it with their actions. In Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, we then try to understand and automate this interesting ability of living systems with machine learning (ML) at the core.

• Generally speaking, deriving mathematical models of complex systems is at the core of any scientific discipline. Researchers have always tried to come up with equations governing the behavior of their systems of interest, ranging from physics and biology to economics.

Machine learning then instantiates the scientific method of searching for a mathematical hypothesis (model) that best fits the observed data. However, thanks to the advances in computing, it allows to further automate this process into searching through large prefabricated hypothesis spaces in a heavily data-driven fashion. This is particularly useful in the modeling of complex systems for which the structure of the underlying hypothesis space is too complex, or even unknown, but large amounts of data are available. Read More #machine-learning