Supervised vs Unsupervised learning

More reading: What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning? (Quora)

Supervised learning

• It requires labeled data for training.

• Tasks are mainly focused on getting a solution or prediction expressed as a:

  • Classification

  • Regression

Unsupervised learning

• It does not require labeled data due to it does not perform training.

• Tasks are mainly focused on getting insights or guesses through:

  • Clustering

  • Visualization

  • Dimensionality reduction

  • Asociation mining

An example: KNN vs kMeans

More reading:

• How is the k-nearest neighbor algorithm different from k-means clustering? (Quora)

K-Nearest Neighbors

• Supervised algorithm

• Based on how similar is an instance from its k neighbors

• There is no training

• It measures the distance between instances (Euclidian, Manhattan...)

kNN

kMeans

• Unsupervised algorithm

• Clustering algorithm

• Iteratively assigns data to k groups

kMeans