An overview of classification

Linear regression models present response variables that are quantitative in nature. However, certain responses are qualitative in nature. Responses such as attitudes (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree) are qualitative in nature. Predicting a qualitative response for an observation can be referred to as classifying that observation, since it involves assigning the observation to a category or class. Classifiers are an invaluable tool for many tasks today, such as medical or genomics predictions, spam detection, face recognition, and finance.