Opinion Mining or Sentiment Analysis is the study that analyzes people's opinions or sentiments from the text towards entities such as products and services. It has always been important to know what other people think. With the rapid growth of availability and popularity of online review sites, blogs', forums', and social networking sites' necessity of analysing and understanding these reviews has arisen. The main approaches for sentiment analysis can be categorized into semantic orientation-based approaches, knowledge-based, and machine-learning algorithms. This chapter surveys the machine learning approaches applied to sentiment analysis-based applications. The main emphasis of this chapter is to discuss the research involved in applying machine learning methods mostly for sentiment classification at document level. Machine learning-based approaches work in the following phases, which are discussed in detail in this chapter for sentiment classification: (1) feature extraction, (2) feature weighting schemes, (3) feature selection, and (4) machine-learning methods. This chapter also discusses the standard free benchmark datasets and evaluation methods for sentiment analysis. The authors conclude the chapter with a comparative study of some state-of-the-art methods for sentiment analysis and some possible future research directions in opinion mining and sentiment analysis.