How do I choose a machine learning algorithm for my application?

3 min readMar 13, 2023

How do I choose a machine learning algorithm for my application? — Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Choosing a machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithm for application is one of the major issues for artificial intelligence (AI) engineers and also data scientists. Here I want to clarify this issue.

In this regard, choosing an appropriate algorithm is based on different factors, such as the type of data you have, the problem you are struggling to solve, and the available resources. Here are some steps which help you to address this issue:

Define the problem:

Identify the problem you are trying to solve and the type of data you have. Is it a classification problem or a regression problem? Do you have labeled or unlabeled data?

Determine the available resources:

Consider the computational resources, time, and configurations available to you. Some algorithms, especially, deep learning algorithms may require a lot of computational power, for instance, powerful CPU, GPU and RAM.

Explore algorithms:

Research and explore different algorithms that are desired for your problem. You can start with simpler algorithms such as decision trees, Naive Bayes, and logistic regression, and steadily move to more complex ones like neural networks and support vector machines (SVM).

Experiment and evaluate:

Implement the algorithms you have selected and evaluate their performance on your data. Use metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score to evaluate the model’s performance.

Iterate:

Based on the evaluation results, iterate and fine-tune the model to improve its performance.

Deploy the model:

Once you have selected and fine-tuned the algorithm, deploy it in your application.

In table 1 and table 2, you can see the applications of some supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms and also DL algorithms at a glance.

Table 1. ML algorithms and their application [table by author]

deep learning algorithms and their application — Table 2. DL algorithms and their application [table by author]

In conclusion, choosing the right algorithm can dramatically affect the performance of your application, so spend your time to test with different options.

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