Understanding supervised learning

As you begin to explore data science either on your own or within an organization, you will often be asked the question, What exactly does supervised machine learning mean? Let's go ahead and come up with a definition. We can define supervised learning as a general subset of machine learning in which data, like its associated labels, is used to train models that can learn or generalize from the data to make predictions, preferably with a high degree of certainty. Thinking back to Chapter 5, Introduction to Machine Learning, we can recall the example we completed concerning the breast cancer dataset in which we classified tumors as being either malignant or benign. This example, alongside the definition we created, is an excellent way to learn and understand the meaning behind supervised learning.

With the definition of supervised machine learning now in our minds, let's go ahead and talk about its different subtypes, namely, classification...