Which term best describes the broader practice of building predictive models from data using algorithms?

• A. Machine learning
• B. Data
• C. Data visualization
• D. Preprocessing

Answer: (A)

The practice of building predictive models from data using algorithms is machine learning. It’s about taking data as the fuel, selecting and applying learning algorithms, and producing models that can make predictions on new data. This goes beyond just having data or presenting it visually: data preprocessing and visualization are helpful steps, but they are part of the workflow that supports learning. The whole process—from preparing data, choosing an algorithm, training on historical examples, to deploying a model that predicts unseen cases—falls under machine learning. For example, training a classifier to distinguish spam from legitimate emails uses patterns learned from labeled examples to predict labels for new emails.