As a broad subfield of artificial intelligence, machine learning is concerned with the development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to "learn". At a general level, there are two types of learning: inductive, and deductive. Inductive machine learning methods create computer programs by extracting rules and patterns out of massive data sets. Some parts of machine learning are closely related to data mining.
Machine learning overlaps heavily with statistics. In fact, many machine learning algorithms have been found to have direct counterparts with statistics. The difference is largely that machine learning research is more focused on the computational properties of the statistical methods, for example their computational complexity.
Machine learning has a wide spectrum of applications including natural language processing, search engines, medical diagnosis, bioinformatics and cheminformatics, detecting credit card fraud, stock market analysis, classifying DNA sequences, speech and handwriting recognition, object recognition in computer vision, game playing and robot locomotion.