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Machine learning is a statistical and computational approach to extracting important patterns and trends in data. This entry is an overview of machine learning methods for social science research. It covers supervised learning methods including generalized linear models, support vector machines, naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbor, artificial neural networks and deep learning, decision trees, and ensemble methods. It also notes several important considerations relevant to supervised learning algorithms including the use of training and test data and cross-validation, loss optimization and evaluation metrics, bias-variance trade-off, and overfitting and regularization strategies. The entry also covers unsupervised learning methods, including k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, network community detection, principal component analysis, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. A section on text analysis incorporates supervised and unsupervised learning of documents and neural networks. The entry provides an overview of new developments at the intersection of machine learning methods and causal inference. Key limitations and considerations for adopting these methods in empirical social science research conclude the entry.

Economics. --- Sociology. --- Social Policy and Public Policy.

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Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1899-1977) was a sociologist, demographer, and social statistician. She has been described as "the most successful woman sociologist of her generation" (Bannister, 1998, p. 226). She produced her first publications while still an undergraduate, coauthoring these with William Fielding Ogburn (Ogburn & Thomas, 1922a, 1922b). In one of these, she pioneered the use of time-series data to document the social effects of business cycles, developing this further in studying for her doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE), for which she was awarded the Hutchinson Silver Medal. Later, she worked with William I. Thomas in producing The Child in America (Thomas & Thomas, 1928), a book renowned today for what was labelled "the Thomas theorem": that people's perceptions of situations, even [...].

Sociology. --- Social Policy and Public Policy.