Machine Learning Foundations, Volume 1: Supervised Learning

Chapter 2

Supervised Machine Learning

Supervised machine learning is a subfield of machine learning focused on building models from labeled data in order to make predictions for new, unseen examples. It is the most widely studied and applied branch of machine learning.

In supervised learning, we are given a dataset that consists of examples paired with their correct outputs—much like a student learning from a teacher who provides questions along with the correct answers. For example, we can use supervised learning to build a spam filter by training on a collection of emails labeled as spam or non-spam. This data-driven approach typically yields filters that are more effective and robust than manually crafted rule-based systems, which tend to ...