“Machine learning.” You’ve heard the term, and you probably nod in agreement when someone tells you how important it is. But secretly you may not be sure what it is or how it works. Ask your data scientists to explain, and you may get lost in a sea of specialist talk about forks, leaf nodes, split points, and recursions. Forget all that. The only thing you need to know is that machine learning applies statistical models to the data you have in order to make smart predictions about data you don’t have.