Spark: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 26. Classification

Classification is the task of predicting a label, category, class, or discrete variable given some input features. The key difference from other ML tasks, such as regression, is that the output label has a finite set of possible values (e.g., three classes).

Use Cases

Classification has many use cases, as we discussed in Chapter 24. Here are a few more to consider as a reinforcement of the multitude of ways classification can be used in the real world.

Predicting credit risk

A financing company might look at a number of variables before offering a loan to a company or individual. Whether or not to offer the loan is a binary classification problem.

News classification

An algorithm might be trained to predict the topic of a news article (sports, politics, business, etc.).

Classifying human activity

By collecting data from sensors such as a phone accelerometer or smart watch, you can predict the person’s activity. The output will be one of a finite set of classes (e.g., walking, sleeping, standing, or running).

Types of Classification

Before we continue, let’s review several different types of classification.

Binary Classification

The simplest example of classification is binary classification, where there are only two labels you can predict. One example is fraud analytics, where a given transaction can be classified as fraudulent or not; or email spam, where a given email can be classified as spam or not spam.

Multiclass Classification