The Importance of Machine Learning in Intelligent Systems

When it comes to the modern business environment, which is characterized by an extremely high degree of competition, and incredible speed and dynamics of business activities, it is almost impossible to imagine the business of a successful company without the support of the most sophisticated information technologies. One of these technologies is certainly intelligent systems, i.e. artificial intelligence systems. Conventional information systems support almost all business processes in companies, and the greatest importance is to support management in making business decisions. The biggest progress in the field of information support for decision-making was made by intelligent systems, which are the first of all known types of information support to the company’s management trying, and to the greatest extent succeeding, to solve problems whose solution was possible only with human intelligence. A large number of intelligent systems, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Expert Systems and Genetic Algorithms, are intended to solve mostly unstructured problems of a very high level of complexity or more precisely problems of such a level of complexity, which cannot be solved by conventional programming methods. Unlike other intelligent systems, which are mostly limited to sequential processing and only to certain specific representations of knowledge and logic, these intelligent systems use a different approach, and that is processing that imitates certain processing abilities possessed by the human brain. One of the most important abilities of human intelligence is learning, both from one’s own and someone else’s experience, which results in recognizing patterns based on experiences. The technology, which enables this ability to be possessed by computers, i.e. computer programs, is called Machine Learning. The aim of this paper is to unify and systematize in one place some basic knowledge that is usually published in various articles and /or books, where the topic of Machine Learning is observed from different aspects, and to explain the concept of Machine Learning, generic algorithms it is based, the types of machine learning, and the importance of applying this technology in intelligent systems.