A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E. 

• Vast amounts of data are being generated in many fields, and the statisticians' job is to make sense of it all: to extract important patterns and trends, and to understand “what the data says”. We call this learning from data.

• Pattern recognition has its origins in engineering, whereas machine learning grew out of computer science. However, these activities can be viewed as two facets of the same field