Book Image

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

By : Sumit Mund, Christina Storm
Book Image

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

By: Sumit Mund, Christina Storm

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Clustering versus classification


It might be confusing for beginners to distinguish between a clustering problem and a classification problem. Classification is fundamentally different from clustering. Classification is a supervised learning problem where your class or target variable is known to train a dataset. The algorithm is trained to look at the examples (features and class or target variables) and then you score and test it with a test dataset.

Clustering, being an unsupervised learning, it works on a dataset with no label or class variable. Also, you don't perform scoring and testing with a test dataset. So, you just apply your algorithm to your data and group them into a different cluster, say 1, 2 and 3, which were not known before.

So, to put it simply, if you have a dataset and a class/label or target variable as categorical variable and you have to predict the target variable for a new dataset based on the given dataset, it's a classification problem. If you are just given a...