Machine Learning in R - Classification, Regression and Clustering Problems
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First up is Classification. A classification problem involves predicting whether a given observation belongs to one of two or more categories. The simplest case of classification is called binary classification. It has to decide between two categories, or classes. Remember how I compared machine learning to the estimation of a function? Well, based on earlier observations of how the input maps to the output, classification tries to estimate a classifier that can generate an output for an arbitrary input, the observations. We say that the classifier labels an unseen example with a class.
The possible applications of classification are very broad. For example, after a set of clinical examinations that relate vital signals to a disease, you could predict whether a new patient with an unseen set of vital signals suffers that disease and needs further treatment. Another totally different example is classifying a set of animal images into cats, dogs and horses, given that you have trained your model on a bunch of images for which you know what animal they depict. Can you think of a possible classification problem yourself?
What's important here is that first off, the output is qualitative, and second, that the classes to which new observations can belong, are known beforehand. In the first example I mentioned, the classes are "sick" and "not sick". In the second examples, the classes are "cat", "dog" and "horse". In chapter 3 we will do a deeper analysis of classification and you'll get to work with some fancy classifiers!
Moving on ... A *Regression problem* is a kind of Machine Learning problem that tries to predict a continuous or quantitative value for an input, based on previous information. The input variables, are called the predictors and the output the response.
In some sense, regression is pretty similar to classification. You're also trying to estimate a function that maps input to output based on earlier observations, but this time you're trying to estimate an actual value, not just the class of an observation.
Do you remember the example from last video, there we had a dataset on a group of people's height and weight. A valid question could be: is there a linear relationship between these two? That is, will a change in height correlate linearly with a change in weight, if so can you describe it and if we know the weight, can you predict the height of a new person given their weight ? These questions can be answered with linear regression!
Together, \beta_0 and \beta_1 are known as the model coefficients or parameters. As soon as you know the coefficients beta 0 and beta 1 the function is able to convert any new input to output. This means that solving your machine learning problem is actually finding good values for beta 0 and beta 1. These are estimated based on previous input to output observations. I will not go into details on how to compute these coefficients, the function `lm()` does this for you in R.
Now, I hear you asking: what can regression be useful for apart from some silly weight and height problems? Well, there are many different applications of regression, going from modeling credit scores based on past payements, finding the trend in your youtube subscriptions over time, or even estimating your chances of landing a job at your favorite company based on your college grades.
All these problems have two things in common. First off, the response, or the thing you're trying to predict, is always quantitative. Second, you will always need input knowledge of previous input-output observations, in order to build your model. The fourth chapter of this course will be devoted to a more comprehensive overview of regression.
Soooo.. Classification: check. Regression: check. Last but not least, there is clustering. In clustering, you're trying to group objects that are similar, while making sure the clusters themselves are dissimilar.
You can think of it as classification, but without saying to which classes the observations have to belong or how many classes there are.
Take the animal photo's for example. In the case of classification, you had information about the actual animals that were depicted. In the case of clustering, you don't know what animals are depicted, you would simply get a set of pictures. The clustering algorithm then simply groups similar photos in clusters.
You could say that clustering is different in the sense that you don't need any knowledge about the labels. Moreover, there is no right or wrong in clustering. Different clusterings can reveal different and useful information about your objects. This makes it quite different from both classification and regression, where there always is a notion of prior expectation or knowledge of the result.
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