Classification tasks and decision boundaries

In the preceding section, we learned about the task of regression or prediction. In this section we will talk about another important task: the task of classification. Let us first understand the difference between regression (also sometimes referred to as prediction) and classification:

• In classification the data is grouped into classes/categories, while in regression the aim is to get a continuous numerical value for given data.
• For example, identifying the number of handwritten digits is a classification task; all handwritten digits will belong to one of the ten numbers lying between [0-9]. The task of predicting the price of the house depending upon different input variables is a regression task.
• In the classification task, the model finds the decision boundaries separating one class from another. In the regression task, the model approximates a function that fits the input-output relationship.
• Classification is a...