Engineering & CS 10 topics
Engineering & CS
Machine learning
10 topics 11 math concepts connects to 8 fields
Machine learning gives computers the ability to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. It sits at the intersection of statistics, linear algebra, and optimisation — and shares its mathematical toolkit with almost every other quantitative field.
Topics in this field
Backpropagation
Efficient computation of gradients in neural networks via the chain rule of calculus.
matrix calculus optimization linear algebra
Cross-Validation
A family of resampling techniques for estimating generalization error and selecting models without a separate held-out test set.
probability theory hypothesis testing
Decision Trees
Recursive partitioning of the feature space using impurity-based splitting criteria to build interpretable prediction rules.
information theory probability theory optimization
Gaussian Processes
A non-parametric Bayesian approach that places a prior directly over functions.
gaussian distribution linear algebra bayes theorem
Gradient Descent
Iterative optimisation by following the steepest downhill direction. The engine of modern ML.
optimization linear algebra matrix calculus
Linear Regression
The simplest supervised learning model — mathematically identical to econometric OLS.
linear algebra gaussian distribution optimization
Neural Networks
Universal function approximators trained by backpropagation, forming the foundation of modern deep learning.
linear algebra matrix calculus optimization
Principal Component Analysis
Linear dimensionality reduction by projecting data onto directions of maximum variance via eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix.
linear algebra eigenvalues matrix calculus
Random Forests
An ensemble method combining bagged decision trees with random feature subsets to produce low-variance, high-accuracy predictions.
probability theory information theory optimization
Support Vector Machines
Maximum-margin classifiers that find the optimal separating hyperplane using convex quadratic programming and the kernel trick.
convex optimization kernel methods linear algebra