Machine Learning,  as it is practiced today, is a field with a huge amount to know -- just as you could make webapps with plain HTML or write them in C and compile them to Javascript you could choose a huge number of algorithms and specific implementations of algorithms.<p>A big part of the future is systems like this<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;machine-learning&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;machine-learning&#x2F;</a><p>which let you get machine learning done without even choosing an &quot;algorithm&quot; such as neural network,  decision trees,  support vector machine,  whatever.  The thing either has a very flexible algorithm in it,  or it chooses an algorithm.<p>That kind of thing is an &quot;expert system&quot; which is an expert on machine learning -- it tries a bunch of things,  evaluates them,  and shows you the best one.<p>A better tool would engage you in a dialog over the data and not be such a black box.