Silvina B.

Tamburini
December 2019
The matter of Statistical Classification:
learning the easy(?) way

Taking an initial look at Artificial Intelligence can be overwhelming and it can give the
feeling that we do not know where to start. Still, curiosity is not easy to please and this is
why it is a good idea to dive in a little bit deeper.
We have already talked about ​supervised learning​ and said that it is, basically, one of
the ways in which we teach the AI how to make decisions as a human would do. We provide
AI with a ​training set​, which consists of a collection of given input and the corresponding
output or answer, all of this previously set, of course, by humans. This way, the AI has
enough data to deduct what a person would do with a similar input and generate an answer
that would be human-like.
This being said, we can move forward in ​supervised learning​. To begin with, let us
first clear up one distinction. AI can learn in two ways: supervised and unsupervised. As can
be concluded from the words themselves, AI will either depend on a human to set the correct
answers beforehand or not.
Here is where ​statistical classification ​comes along as a problem in ​supervised
learning. ​When creating a training set for AI we have, on one side, data as input and, on the
other side, a certain amount of outcomes for that data when it is processed. Depending on
whether the outcome will be a number (positive or negative) or a category/class, we talk
about ​regression ​vs. ​classification, ​respectively.
The problem in ​statistical classification ​is, put in simple terms, the problem of under
which category we place an observation or piece of data (input). In order to do this, we will
have the data analyzed into certain sets of properties that can be quantifiable, i.e.
explanatory variables. For example, we can check if the data falls under a category like
small o ​ r ​big. ​We will do this through algorithms, called ​classifiers, ​which will use this way of
analyzing data.
Terms can vary across different fields like statistics or machine learning. However, for
practical purposes, we will use these terms from now onwards and refer back to them every
now and then, so why not continue to find out more about how AI learns in future posts?