OBJECTIVES
- Like human learning from past experiences, a computer does not have “experiences”.
- A computer system learns from data, which represent some “past experiences” of an application domain.
- Our focus: learn a target function that can be used to predict the values of a discrete class attribute, e.g., approve or not-approved, and high-risk or low risk.
- The task is commonly called: Supervised learning, classification, or inductive learning.
- Data: A set of data records (also called examples, instances or cases) described by
- k attributes: A1, A2, … Ak.
- a class: Each example is labelled with a pre-defined class.
- Goal: To learn a classification model from the data that can be used to predict the classes of new (future, or test) cases/instances.