Machine learning (ML) is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) concerned with enabling computer systems to improve their performance on specific tasks by learning from data. Traditional programming usually requires all steps and rules to be explicitly specified; however, in ML, the system learns autonomously by analyzing and recognizing patterns in data and continuously optimizes its own performance based on the data. The core idea of ML is to allow computers to automatically discover laws, trends, and patterns from data in order to make predictions, classification, clustering, and other tasks. This requires training the model with large amounts of data, allowing the model to extract general rules from it, and then applies these rules to new, unseen data. ML can be broken down into several subfields, including but not limited to, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, and reinforcement learning (Fig. 2.1).