Machine learning – unsupervised and supervised learning

Machine Learning (ML) is a set of techniques and algorithms that gives computers the ability to learn. These techniques are generic and can be used in various fields. Data mining uses ML techniques to create insights and predictions from data.

In data mining, we usually divide ML methods into two main groups – supervised learning and unsupervised learning. A computer can learn with the help of a teacher (supervised learning) or can discover new knowledge without the assistance of a teacher (unsupervised learning).

In supervised learning, the learner is trained with a set of examples (dataset) that contains the right answer; we call it the training dataset. We call the dataset that contains the answers a labeled dataset, because each observation is labeled with its answer. In supervised learning, you are supervising the computer, giving it the right answers. For example, a bank can try to predict the borrower's...