Relation To Other Problems
Classification and clustering are examples of the more general problem of pattern recognition, which is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value. Other examples are regression, which assigns a real-valued output to each input; sequence labeling, which assigns a class to each member of a sequence of values (for example, part of speech tagging, which assigns a part of speech to each word in an input sentence); parsing, which assigns a parse tree to an input sentence, describing the syntactic structure of the sentence; etc.
A common subclass of classification is probabilistic classification. Algorithms of this nature use statistical inference to find the best class for a given instance. Unlike other algorithms, which simply output a "best" class, probabilistic algorithms output a probability of the instance being a member of each of the possible classes. The best class is normally then selected as the one with the highest probability. However, such an algorithm has numerous advantages over non-probabilistic classifiers:
- It can output a confidence value associated with its choice (in general, a classifier that can do this is known as a confidence-weighted classifier)
- Correspondingly, it can abstain when its confidence of choosing any particular output is too low
- Because of the probabilities output, probabilistic classifiers can be more effectively incorporated into larger machine-learning tasks, in a way that partially or completely avoids the problem of error propagation.
Read more about this topic: Classification (machine Learning)
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation and/or problems:
“There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artists relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artists concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relation with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.”
—Andrei Codrescu (b. 1947)
“Those great ideas which come to you in your sleep just before you awake in morning, those solutions to the worlds problems which, in the light of day, turn out to be duds of the puniest order, couldnt they be put to some use, after all?”
—Robert Benchley (18891945)