1.3. Key tasks of machine learning

In this section we’ll outline the key jobs of machine learning and set a framework that allows us to easily turn a machine learning algorithm into a solid working application.

The example covered previously was for the task of classification. In classification, our job is to predict what class an instance of data should fall into. Another task in machine learning is regression. Regression is the prediction of a numeric value. Most people have probably seen an example of regression with a best-fit line drawn through some data points to generalize the data points. Classification and regression are examples of supervised learning. This set of problems is known as supervised because we’re telling the algorithm what to predict.