Machine learning deals with the issue of how to build programs that improve their performance at some task through experience. Machine learning algorithms have proven to be of great practical value in a variety of application domains. Not surprisingly, the field of software engineering turns out to be a fertile ground where many software development and maintenance tasks could be formulated as learning problems and approached in terms of learning algorithms. This paper deals with the subject of applying machine learning methods to software engineering. In the paper, we first provide the characteristics and applicability of some frequently utilized machine learning algorithms. We then summarize and analyze the existing work and discuss some general issues in this niche area. Finally we offer some guidelines on applying machine learning methods to software engineering tasks.