ITPEC FE Subject A April 2025 Question 3

Learning patterns from data, the way humans learn — machine learning lets a computer improve at a task by finding regularities in example data instead of following rules a person wrote in.

A machine-learning system is given data (in supervised learning, examples with the correct answers), extracts patterns from it, and uses them to classify or predict new cases. The knowledge comes from the data, not from a programmer or an expert.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

• •(a) — describes an expert system: a specialist's knowledge is entered as rules and the computer infers from them, learning nothing from data
• •(c) — describes artificial life and evolutionary computation, which simulate living phenomena and evolution
• •(d) — describes e-learning or a learning management system, where people learn with IT support; the computer itself learns nothing

Key rule: If the knowledge is entered by people, it is an expert system; if the program derives it from data, it is machine learning.

Basic Theory · AI-written, may contain errors