  As a key technique for enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning
(ML) is capable of solving complex problems without explicit programming.
Motivated by its successful applications to many practical tasks like image
recognition, both industry and the research community have advocated the
applications of ML in wireless communication. This paper comprehensively
surveys the recent advances of the applications of ML in wireless
communication, which are classified as: resource management in the MAC layer,
networking and mobility management in the network layer, and localization in
the application layer. The applications in resource management further include
power control, spectrum management, backhaul management, cache management,
beamformer design and computation resource management, while ML based
networking focuses on the applications in clustering, base station switching
control, user association and routing. Moreover, literatures in each aspect is
organized according to the adopted ML techniques. In addition, several
conditions for applying ML to wireless communication are identified to help
readers decide whether to use ML and which kind of ML techniques to use, and
traditional approaches are also summarized together with their performance
comparison with ML based approaches, based on which the motivations of surveyed
literatures to adopt ML are clarified. Given the extensiveness of the research
area, challenges and unresolved issues are presented to facilitate future
studies, where ML based network slicing, infrastructure update to support ML
based paradigms, open data sets and platforms for researchers, theoretical
guidance for ML implementation and so on are discussed.
