Learn AI · Level 2 · How AI works · step 5 of 16 · word 1 of 5
What is the difference between classification and regression?
Classification models pick a category, such as spam or not spam. Regression models predict a number, such as a house price. Most business machine learning is one or the other.
In plain English
Before building a machine learning model, a team decides what kind of answer it should give. If the answer is a label from a fixed list, it is classification. If the answer is a number on a scale, it is regression.
An example
A bank’s fraud model is classification: each card payment is “fraud” or “genuine”. A model that predicts how much a customer will spend next month is regression: the answer is an amount, such as 412 dirhams.
Watch out
The choice decides how the model is judged. A classifier is checked with measures like precision and recall; a regression model by how far off its numbers are. See how a whole model gets built in our step-by-step guide.