8.1 Classification

Classification is a supervised learning task where the model predicts a discrete label or category for each input. Given examples that already have correct answers (labels), the model learns the patterns that separate one category from another, then applies them to new, unseen data.

A familiar example: an email app that decides whether each message is 'spam' or 'not spam'. It was trained on thousands of emails already marked by people, and now it sorts incoming mail automatically.