Supervised Classification

Classification problems are, besides regression problems, another large class of machine learning problems. They belong to the category of supervised learning, and the goal is to learn how to sort data into different categories. While the ML methods are quite different from those used for regression, the fundamental aspects of learning are similar. In this chapter, we start with a detailed introduction of classification based on intuitive, rule-based classification methods. We then cover a number of the most commonly used machine learning classification methods: the class of nearest neighbor classifiers, the Gaussian naive Bayes model, and support vector machines.