Machine Learning, Data Science, AI, Deep Learning, and Statistics – It’s All So Confusing

It seems like these days every healthcare IT company out there is saying they’re doing machine learning, AI, deep learning, etc. So many companies are using these terms that they’ve started to lose meaning. The problem is that people are using these labels regardless of whether they really apply. Plus, we all have different definitions for these terms.

As I search to understand the differences myself, I found this great tweet from Ronald van Loon that looks at this world and tries to better define it:

In that tweet, Ronald also links to an article that looks at some of the differences. I liked this part he took from Quora:

  • AI (Artificial intelligence) is a subfield of computer science, that was created in the 1960s, and it was (is) concerned with solving tasks that are easy for humans, but hard for computers. In particular, a so-called Strong AI would be a system that can do anything a human can (perhaps without purely physical things). This is fairly generic, and includes all kinds of tasks, such as planning, moving around in the world, recognizing objects and sounds, speaking, translating, performing social or business transactions, creative work (making art or poetry), etc.
  • Machine learning is concerned with one aspect of this: given some AI problem that can be described in discrete terms (e.g. out of a particular set of actions, which one is the right one), and given a lot of information about the world, figure out what is the “correct” action, without having the programmer program it in. Typically some outside process is needed to judge whether the action was correct or not. In mathematical terms, it’s a function: you feed in some input, and you want it to to produce the right output, so the whole problem is simply to build a model of this mathematical function in some automatic way. To draw a distinction with AI, if I can write a very clever program that has human-like behavior, it can be AI, but unless its parameters are automatically learned from data, it’s not machine learning.
  • Deep learning is one kind of machine learning that’s very popular now. It involves a particular kind of mathematical model that can be thought of as a composition of simple blocks (function composition) of a certain type, and where some of these blocks can be adjusted to better predict the final outcome.

Is that clear for you now? Would you suggest different definitions? Where do you see people using these terms correctly and where do you see them using them incorrectly?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Historically most buzz words of the month have lost their meaning before the month ends. This graphic is a very good top level overview of the parts of each of these main categories and I would expect no less from Gartner. It’s not the definitions as much as it is the interpretation. Computing is not magic. Benefits from using high-level computing such as AI and data mining will outweigh the costs and the ROI return will be much quicker. This is shown in manufacturing using robotics (another AI derivative). Population health management will benefit from data mining, think marketing and how they use data mining, check your Google browser for the ads that pop up. We have a long way to go. We need to stop committee after committed and start to commit.

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