Although, there is not a simple answer for what came first - Chicken or Egg?, in Machine Learning, there is an easy answer. Data came first before any function. Machine learning is all about learning from data. The learning algorithm tries to learn a function that can either classify the data into different categories, or learn the function itself that plots the data. There are two popular ways in which a Machine Learning algorithm can be taught to learn a function, but in both cases it needs data. Supervised Learning : We give the algorithm a lot of data with both input and output, and it learns the function. In case of regression problems, the function approximately plots the function that understands the data. In case of classification problems, the function tries to classify the data. Unsupervised Learning : We give the algorithm a lot of input data with no output, and it tries to find patterns in the data. The algorithm classifies the data based on the similarities ...