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Blog > Machine Learning > Classical Examples of Supervised vs. Unsupervised...

Classical Examples of Supervised vs.

Unsupervised Learning in Machine Learning
Semih Yagcioglu | 7 minute read | May 18, 2020

In this article

What Is Supervised Learning In Machine Learning?

What Is Unsupervised Learning?

Like humans, machines are capable of learning in different ways. When it comes to machine learning, the most
common learning strategies are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. This
post will focus on unsupervised learning and supervised learning algorithms, and provide typical examples of
each.

What Is Supervised Learning In Machine Learning?

As the name indicates, supervised learning involves machine learning algorithms that learn under the presence
of a supervisor. 

Learning under supervision directly translates to being under guidance and learning from an entity that is in
charge of providing feedback through this process. When training a machine, supervised learning refers to a
category of methods in which we teach or train a machine learning algorithm using data, while guiding the
algorithm model with labels associated with the data. 

As humans, we consume a lot of information, but often don’t notice these data points. When we see a photo of
an animal, for example, we instantly know what the animal is based on our prior experience. But what happens
when the learner doesn’t instantly recognize the animal? 

When the learner makes a guess and predicts what the animal might be, we have the opportunity to objectively
evaluate if the learner has given a correct answer or not. This is possible because we have the correct labels of
input.

From now on, we’ll be referring to the machine learning algorithm as “the model.” Now, if the model gave a
correct answer, then there is nothing for us to do. Our job is to correct the model when the output of the model
is wrong. If this is the case, we need to make sure that the model makes necessary updates so that the next
time a cat image is shown to the model, it can correctly identify the image. 

The formal supervised learning process involves input variables, which we call (X), and an output variable,
which we call (Y). We use an algorithm to learn the mapping function from the input to the output. In simple
mathematics, the output (Y) is a dependent variable of input (X) as illustrated by:

Y = f(X)

Here, our end goal is to try to approximate the mapping function (f), so that we can predict the output variables
(Y) when we have new input data (X).
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Examples of Supervised Learning

Now that we’ve covered supervised learning, it is time to look at classic examples of supervised learning
algorithms.

In supervised learning, our goal is to learn the mapping function (f), which refers to being able to understand
how the input (X) should be matched with output (Y) using available data.

Here, the machine learning model learns to fit mapping between examples of input features with their
associated labels. When models are trained with these examples, we can use them to make new predictions
on unseen data.

The predicted labels can be both numbers or categories. For instance, if we are predicting house prices, then
the output is a number. In this case, the model is a regression model. If we are predicting if an email is spam or
not, the output is a category and the model is a classification model. 

Example: House prices

One practical example of supervised learning problems is predicting house prices. How is this achieved?

First, we need data about the houses: square footage, number of rooms, features, whether a house has a
garden or not, and so on. We then need to know the prices of these houses, i.e. the corresponding labels. By
leveraging data coming from thousands of houses, their features and prices, we can now train a supervised
machine learning model to predict a new house’s price based on the examples observed by the model. 

Example: Is it a cat or a dog?

Image classification is a popular problem in the computer vision field. Here, the goal is to predict what class an
image belongs to. In this set of problems, we are interested in finding the class label of an image. More
precisely: is the image of a car or a plane? A cat or a dog?

Example: How’s the weather today?

One particularly interesting problem which requires considering a lot of different parameters is predicting
weather conditions in a particular location. To make correct predictions for the weather, we need to take into
account various parameters, including historical temperature data, precipitation, wind, humidity, and so on.

This particularly interesting and challenging problem may require developing complex supervised models that
include multiple tasks. Predicting today’s temperature is a regression problem, where the output labels are
continuous variables. By contrast, predicting whether it is going to snow or not tomorrow is a binary
classification problem.

Want to learn more? Check out our post on How an ML Algorithm Helped Make Hurricane Damage
Assessments Safer, Cheaper, and More Effective.

Example: Who are the unhappy customers?

Another great example of supervised learning is text classification problems. In this set of problems, the goal
is to predict the class label of a given piece of text.

One particularly popular topic in text classification is to predict the sentiment of a piece of text, like a tweet or
a product review. This is widely used in the e-commerce industry to help companies to determine negative
comments made by customers.
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What Is Unsupervised Learning?

In supervised learning, the main idea is to learn under supervision, where the supervision signal is named as
target value or label. In unsupervised learning, we lack this kind of signal. Therefore, we need to find our way
without any supervision or guidance. This simply means that we are alone and need to figure out what is what
by ourselves. 

However, we are not totally in the dark. We do this kind of learning every day. In unsupervised learning, even
though we do not have any labels for data points, we do have the actual data points. This means we can draw
references from observations in the input data. 

Imagine you are in a foreign country and you are visiting a food market, for example. You see a stall selling a
fruit that you cannot identify. You don’t know the name of this fruit. However, you have your observations to
rely on, and you can use these as a reference. In this case, you can easily the fruit apart from nearby
vegetables or other food by identifying its various features like its shape, color, or size.

This is roughly how unsupervised learning happens. We use the data points as references to find meaningful
structure and patterns in the observations. Unsupervised learning is commonly used for finding meaningful
patterns and groupings inherent in data, extracting generative features, and exploratory purposes.

Examples of Unsupervised Learning

There are a few different types of unsupervised learning. We’ll review three common approaches below.

Example: Finding customer segments

Clustering is an unsupervised technique where the goal is to find natural groups or clusters in a feature space
and interpret the input data. There are many different clustering algorithms. One common approach is to divide
the data points in a way that each data point falls into a group that is similar to other data points in the same
group based on a predefined similarity or distance metric in the feature space.

Clustering is commonly used for determining customer segments in marketing data. Being able to determine
different segments of customers helps marketing teams approach these customer segments in unique ways.
(Think of features like gender, location, age, education, income bracket, and so on.)
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Example: Reducing the complexity of a problem

Dimensionality reduction is a commonly used unsupervised learning technique where the goal is to reduce the
number of random variables under consideration. It has several practical applications. One of the most
common uses of dimensionality reduction is to reduce the complexity of a problem by projecting the feature
space to a lower-dimensional space so that less correlated variables are considered in a machine learning
system. 

The most common approaches used in dimensionality reduction are PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP algorithms. They
are especially useful for reducing the complexity of a problem and also visualizing the data instances in a
better way. Before going into more detail about feature projection, let’s look at another important concept in
machine learning: feature selection.

Example: Feature selection

Even though feature selection and dimensionality reduction aim towards reducing the number of features in
the original set of features, understanding how feature selection works helps us get a better understanding of
dimensionality reduction.

Assume that we want to predict how capable an applicant is of repaying a loan from the perspective of a bank.
Here, we need to help the bank set up a machine learning system so that each loan can be given to applicants
who can repay the loan. We need a lot of information about each application to make predictions. A few
important attributes about applicants are the applicant’s average monthly income, debt, credit history, and so
on. 

Typically, however, banks collect much more information from applicants when taking their applications. Not
all of it is relevant for predicting an applicant’s credit risk score. For instance, does an applicant’s age make
any difference while deciding whether the applicant can repay the loan? Is the applicant’s gender important for
determining the credit risk score? Probably not. 

It is important to understand that not every feature adds value to solving the problem. Therefore, eliminating
these features is an essential part of machine learning. In feature selection, we try to eliminate a subset of the
original set of features. 

In dimensionality reduction, we still discard features but do that in a way that the feature space is projected
onto a smaller feature space, therefore eliminating less important information during this process.

Ready to learn more?

Check out Springboard’s ML Career Track or our general Career Tracks to find the perfect fit for your next
career. We offer online courses in UI/UX design, data science, data analytics, software engineering, and
machine learning—all with our one-of-a-kind job guarantee. Each student gets a 6-month runway to secure a
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About Semih Yagcioglu

Semih is the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Apziva and a Ph.D. candidate at Hacettepe
University. He also mentors at Springboard in Machine Learning areas. He is interested in AI
and focuses on solving various challenging real-world problems through developing
intelligent systems.
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