Software Sorting

In this chapter, I look at how computers sort data into categories and link the data within them. Specifically, I outline how machine learning (ML) techniques tend to be used to create groups and categories. I also explore how these categories are then applied to people across a number of contexts, based on characteristics given on social media platforms. Through this, I hope to provide readers with an accessible overview of some of the techniques that computers use to create groups of people. This chapter starts by giving rudimentary explanations of the ML techniques used to separate data into categories based on specific goals (e.g., to combine all users within a specific age range or from the same geographical location). After exploring how data are sorted into the required groups, we shall see how connections between the data in each group are generated. The final part of the chapter illustrates how ML techniques are used to create these groups robustly and using quantifiable metrics, enabling us to assess just how effective a particular grouping is in meeting a specific goal.