There is no doubt that big data are now rapidly expanding in all science and engineering domains. While the potential of these massive data is undoubtedly significant, fully making sense of them requires new ways of thinking and novel learning techniques to address the various challenges. In this paper, we present a literature survey of the latest advances in researches on machine learning for big data processing. First, we review the machine learning techniques and highlight some promising learning methods in recent studies, such as representation learning, deep learning, distributed and parallel learning, transfer learning, active learning, and kernel-based learning. Next, we focus on the analysis and discussions about the challenges and possible solutions of machine learning for big data. Following that, we investigate the close connections of machine learning with signal processing techniques for big data processing. Finally, we outline several open issues and research trends. Introduction: It is obvious that we are living in a data deluge era, evidenced by the phenomenon that enormous amount of data have been being continually generated at unprecedented and ever increasing scales. Large-scale data sets are collected and studied in numerous domains, from engineering sciences to social networks, commerce, biomolecular research, and security [1]. Particularly, digital data, generated from a variety of digital devices, are growing at astonishing rates. According to [2], in 2011, digital information has grown nine times in volume in just 5 years and its amount in the world will reach 35 trillion gigabytes by 2020 [3].