ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

PRML

PRML stands for Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. It is a fancy way of teaching computers to recognize patterns in data and make predictions about new data based on those patterns.

Let’s say you have a group of different fruits, like an apple, an orange, and a banana. You want to teach a computer to recognize which fruit is which.

First, you give the computer a bunch of examples of each fruit, like a bunch of pictures. The computer looks at these pictures and tries to find common patterns that allow it to tell the difference between the different kinds of fruits. It might notice that apples are generally round, red or green, and have a stem on top. Oranges are usually orange and have a bumpy surface. Bananas are usually yellow, long, and have a curved shape.

Once the computer has learned these patterns, it can use them to recognize new fruits it hasn’t seen before. For example, if you showed the computer a picture of a red round fruit with a stem on top, it would recognize it as an apple.

This kind of machine learning has many applications, like recognizing faces, detecting spam emails, or predicting the weather. It’s like having a really smart assistant that can recognize patterns and make predictions for you. And all of this is made possible by the power of technology and programming.