Supervised learning

In machine learning, supervised learning (SL) is a type of machine learning paradigm where an algorithm learns to map input data to a specific output based on example input-output pairs. This process involves training a statistical model using labeled data, meaning each piece of input data is provided with the correct output. For instance, if you want a model to identify cats in images, supervised learning would involve feeding it many images of cats (inputs) that are explicitly labeled "cat" (outputs).

The goal of supervised learning is for the trained model to accurately predict the output for new, unseen data.^[1] This requires the algorithm to effectively generalize from the training examples, a quality measured by its generalization error. Supervised learning is commonly used for tasks like classification (predicting a category, e.g., spam or not spam) and regression (predicting a continuous value, e.g., house prices).