Supervised machine learning can be further subdivided into exercises that involve either of the following:
- Classification
- Regression
The concepts are quite straightforward.
Classification involves a machine learning task that has a discrete outcome - a categorical outcome. All nouns are categorical variables, such as fruits, trees, color, and true/false.
The outcome variables in classification exercises are also known as discrete or categorical variables.
Some examples include:
- Identifying the fruit given size, weight, and shape
- Identifying numbers given a set of images of numbers (as shown in the earlier chapter)
- Identifying objects on the streets
- Identifying playing cards as diamonds, spades, hearts ...
