15.6 Classification
Classification provides answers to questions like the following:
- Wear the blue, white, or yellow shirt?
- Buy or lease the car?
- Hire or don’t hire the person?
- Watch or don’t watch the movie?
- Take or don’t take the class?
- Read the email or move it to the spam folder?
- Issue the credit card or not?
Classification looks at an observation and places it in one of several classes. In the first question, the observation is the situation for which I am choosing the shirt and my past behavior. There are three possible shirts, and so three classes. The other questions require binary classification because they each have only two possible answers, “yes” or “no.”
The general classification discipline of statistics and machine learning does not limit itself to two classes, though binary classification...
