AI Glossary Term
What does “Classifier” mean?
A model designed specifically for classification tasks.
How Classifier works
Example
A medical-imaging classifier takes a chest X-ray and outputs a score for each possible finding. A clinician uses the highest scores as a prompt for closer review, not as a final diagnosis.
Why it matters
A classifier is the model behind many everyday automated decisions, such as filtering spam or flagging content. Its mistakes are the practical measure of whether it is useful.
Common questions
Is a classifier always a neural network?
No. Classifiers can be decision trees, logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks, and more.
What does a classifier output?
Typically a score or probability for each class, and a final label chosen from those scores.
How do you improve a classifier?
Better data and labels, more suitable features or architecture, and tuning thresholds to balance different types of errors.