AI Glossary Term

What does “Supervised Learning” mean?

Definition

Training a model with labeled examples that map inputs to known outputs.

How Supervised Learning works

Diagram for Supervised Learning, steps in order: Labeled examples: input + right answer; then Model guesses; then Compare with the label, adjust; then Predict on new inputs.Labeled examples: input + right answerModel guessesCompare with the label, adjustPredict on new inputs

Example

To predict house prices, you give the model thousands of past sales with their actual prices. It learns the link between features and price and then estimates the price of a house it has not seen.

Why it matters

It is the most common form of machine learning in business. It needs good labels, which can be costly to get.

Common questions

Two main tasks?

Classification (predict a category) and regression (predict a number).

Where do labels come from?

People, records of past outcomes, or measurements.

Supervised vs unsupervised?

Supervised uses labeled answers; unsupervised looks for structure without them.

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See also