Python Machine Learning By Example - Second Edition

Getting started with classification

Spam email detection is basically a machine learning classification problem. Let's get started by learning important concepts of machine learning classification. Classification is one of the main instances of supervised learning. Given a training set of data containing observations and their associated categorical outputs, the goal of classification is to learn a general rule that correctly maps the observations (also called features or predictive variables) to the target categories (also called labels or classes). Put another way, a trained classification model will be generated after learning from features and targets of training samples, as shown in the first half of the following diagram. When new or ...