Deep Learning

7 Classification

An important application of machine learning involves looking at a set of inputs, comparing each one to a list of possible classes (or categories), and assigning each input to its most probable class. This process is called classification or categorization, and we say that it’s carried out by a classifier. We can use classes for tasks as diverse as identifying the words someone has spoken into their cell phone, what animals are visible in a photograph, or whether a piece of fruit is ripe or not.

In this chapter, we look at the basic ideas behind classification. We don’t consider specific classification algorithms here because ...