Machine Learning For Microbiologists

Machine learning is an increasingly important tool in microbiology, used for tasks such as predicting antibiotic resistance and associating human microbiome features with complex host diseases. This review examines the main machine learning concepts, tasks and applications that are relevant for experimental and clinical microbiologists, providing the minimal toolbox for a microbiologist to understand, interpret and use machine learning in their activities. It can be generally categorized as supervised machine learning, aimed at developing predictive models given training data, and unsupervised machine learning, aimed at grouping observations or creating simplified representations of major structures of the data.