8.1 Basic Concepts

We introduce the concept of classification in Section 8.1.1. Section 8.1.2 describes the general approach to classification as a two-step process. In the first step, we build a classification model based on previous data. In the second step, we determine if the model’s accuracy is acceptable, and if so, we use the model to classify new data.

8.1.1 What Is Classification?

A bank loans officer needs analysis of her data to learn which loan applicants are “safe” and which are “risky” for the bank. A marketing manager at AllElectronics needs data analysis to help guess whether a customer with a given profile will buy a new computer. A medical researcher wants to analyze breast cancer data to predict which one of three specific ...

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