Assigning data into categorical compartments (ex: cat/dog, apple/pear/banana, etc.) is Classification
More formally, Classification refers to the process of assigning an input vector of features into a pre-determined set of classes.
Classification is an example of Supervised learning, where we learn from training data to make predictions.
For example:
binary classification
- predicting if the Stock Market with go UP or DOWN tomorrow (two classes also known as Binary Classification).
- we might use economic indicators, company performance information, news sentiment etc, to guide our prediction
multi-class classification
- classifying if a news article is about Sports, Politics, Entertainment, or international ( 4 classes )
- we might use named entities, and other words mentioned in the text as input to our classification model
multi-label classification
- Predicting the genres of a movie into Action, Adventure, Comedy, Horror, etc. A movie can have multiple genres.
- we might use plot summary as input text to assign multiple labels to a movie.