Machine Learning in Java - Second Edition

Measurement scales

The most common way to represent data is using a set of attribute-value pairs. Consider the following example:

Bob = { 
height: 185cm, 
eye color: blue, 
hobbies: climbing, sky diving 
} 

For example, Bob has attributes named height, eye color, and hobbies with the values 185cm, blue, climbing, and sky diving respectively.

A set of data can be presented simply as a table, where columns correspond to attributes or features and rows correspond to particular data examples or instances. In supervised machine learning, the attribute whose value we want to predict the outcome, Y, from the values of the other attributes, X, is denoted as the class or target variable, as shown in the following table:

Name

Height [cm]

Eye color ...