What Is Prediction And Its Role In Our Lives

Prediction is the art of knowing ahead future occurrence or outcome of an event based on experience, re-occurring patterns or statistical analysis. Prediction is not only limited to telling ahead what could happen in the future but it also makes it possible to know the cause of an event or action based on the present happening or outcome. If you know what can cause an action or occurrence, it is possible to know what could have caused the incident and how it would have happened or possible ways it would have happened

Prediction is seen in every area of our lives; home, institution, corporate bodies, government, businesses and has become part of us. In homes, children predict when their parent arrival, wife predicts what the husband and children would likely eat, husband predict the location and movement of the wife and children. A lecturer in the institution also predicts the range of result a student would graduate with based on his current cumulative grade point average (CGPA), his seriousness and participation in class exercise. Entrepreneurs predict their income based on specific business strategy, business experience, and their target customer. In medicals, prediction helps to predict if and when a patient will recover fully or die based on the illness and treatment being given, likewise the possible cause of a sickness. In sports, we predict who wins, who scores and when as seen in the likes of Naijabet, surebet, merrybet, betnaija and so on. Farmers also predict the yield time of crops, the gestation and parturition of animal and the profit margin of agricultural produce. Economist predicts, stock prices, oil price, inflation and devaluation, value of currency and the future state of a country’s economy based on some future and current facts.

Prediction helps us plan ahead and prepare for the future. It also guides us in knowing what to do and what steps to take in effecting changes and achieving a goal. When you do not know what could possible happen, one is will always be on the watch for danger but when the outcome of a thing is known ahead, there is confidence, peace and courage to proceeded and do something else. Other areas where prediction is applied which will be reviewed later in this research area, engineering, geography, finance, market, technology, communication, sentiment analysis, election, weather forecasting, agriculture, institutions. In fact, people predict what they will become in years to come.

Machine learning on the other hand is an area of artificial intelligence which is based on the idea that computers can be programmed to automatically learn themselves and improve on their performance without human intervention. What you do is to subject the machine to data in which the machine will find the patterns and trends in the data or give it a goal to accomplish it without the help of human. Machine learning has been around since decades ago but it is just finding use due to the powerful, sophisticated computers and the availability of large digital data we have now.Machine learning has been applied in different such as image recognition, voice recognition, data mining, image classification, natural language processing, personal education and prediction.

This research is limited to the application of machine learning for prediction purposes. Machine learning make prediction easier, faster and more accurate. Due powerful computers we have now, large volume of data which human cannot comprehend or that will take human years to compute and be processed within a short time. Few application of machine learning for prediction is prediction of movies you would like to watch based on previous seen movies and your interest, how people will respond to mails, Jumia and Konga predicting what you would likely buy. Prediction has become part of us that we do not notice them again.