Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can effectively generalize and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance.Machine learning approaches have been applied to large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, email filtering, agriculture and medicine, where it is too costly to develop algorithms to perform the needed tasks.

The mathematical foundations of ML are provided by mathematical optimization (mathematical programming) methods. Data mining is a related (parallel) field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis through unsupervised learning.