8. A Few Instructive Applications

For someone wishing to become an expert on machine learning, mastering a handful of baseline techniques is not enough. Far from it. The world lurking behind a textbook’s toy domains has a way of complicating things, frustrating the engineer with unexpected obstacles, and challenging everybody’s notion of what exactly the induced classifier is supposed to do and why. Just as in any other field of technology, success is hard to achieve without a healthy dose of creativity.