Supervised learning

In machine learning, supervised learning (SL) is a

paradigm where a model is trained using input
objects (e.g. a vector of predictor variables) and
desired output values (also known as a supervisory
signal), which are often human-made labels. The
training process builds a function that maps new
data to expected output values.[1] An optimal
scenario will allow for the algorithm to accurately In supervised learning, the training data is labeled
determine output values for unseen instances. This with the expected answers, while in unsupervised
requires the learning algorithm to generalize from learning, the model identifies patterns or structures
in unlabeled data.
the training data to unseen situations in a
"reasonable" way (see inductive bias). This
statistical quality of an algorithm is measured via a generalization error.

Steps to follow
To solve a given problem of supervised learning, the following steps must be performed:

1. Determine the type of training samples. Before doing anything else, the user should decide
what kind of data is to be used as a training set. In the case of handwriting analysis, for
example, this might be a single handwritten character, an entire handwritten word, an entire
sentence of handwriting, or a full paragraph of handwriting.
2. Gather a training set. The training set needs to be representative of the real-world use of the
function. Thus, a set of input objects is gathered together with corresponding outputs, either
from human experts or from measurements.
3. Determine the input feature representation of the learned function. The accuracy of the
learned function depends strongly on how the input object is represented. Typically, the
input object is transformed into a feature vector, which contains a number of features that
are descriptive of the object. The number of features should not be too large, because of the
curse of dimensionality; but should contain enough information to accurately predict the
output.
4. Determine the structure of the learned function and corresponding learning algorithm. For
example, one may choose to use support-vector machines or decision trees.
5. Complete the design. Run the learning algorithm on the gathered training set. Some
supervised learning algorithms require the user to determine certain control parameters.
These parameters may be adjusted by optimizing performance on a subset (called a
validation set) of the training set, or via cross-validation.
6. Evaluate the accuracy of the learned function. After parameter adjustment and learning, the
performance of the resulting function should be measured on a test set that is separate from
the training set.

Algorithm choice
A wide range of supervised learning algorithms are available, each with its strengths and weaknesses.
There is no single learning algorithm that works best on all supervised learning problems (see the No free
lunch theorem).

There are four major issues to consider in supervised learning:

Bias–variance tradeoff
A first issue is the tradeoff between bias and variance.[2] Imagine that we have available several different,
but equally good, training data sets. A learning algorithm is biased for a particular input if, when trained
on each of these data sets, it is systematically incorrect when predicting the correct output for . A
learning algorithm has high variance for a particular input if it predicts different output values when
trained on different training sets. The prediction error of a learned classifier is related to the sum of the
bias and the variance of the learning algorithm.[3] Generally, there is a tradeoff between bias and
variance. A learning algorithm with low bias must be "flexible" so that it can fit the data well. But if the
learning algorithm is too flexible, it will fit each training data set differently, and hence have high
variance. A key aspect of many supervised learning methods is that they are able to adjust this tradeoff
between bias and variance (either automatically or by providing a bias/variance parameter that the user
can adjust).

Function complexity and amount of training data

The second issue is of the amount of training data available relative to the complexity of the "true"
function (classifier or regression function). If the true function is simple, then an "inflexible" learning
algorithm with high bias and low variance will be able to learn it from a small amount of data. But if the
true function is highly complex (e.g., because it involves complex interactions among many different
input features and behaves differently in different parts of the input space), then the function will only be
able to learn with a large amount of training data paired with a "flexible" learning algorithm with low bias
and high variance.

Dimensionality of the input space

A third issue is the dimensionality of the input space. If the input feature vectors have large dimensions,
learning the function can be difficult even if the true function only depends on a small number of those
features. This is because the many "extra" dimensions can confuse the learning algorithm and cause it to
have high variance. Hence, input data of large dimensions typically requires tuning the classifier to have
low variance and high bias. In practice, if the engineer can manually remove irrelevant features from the
input data, it will likely improve the accuracy of the learned function. In addition, there are many
algorithms for feature selection that seek to identify the relevant features and discard the irrelevant ones.
This is an instance of the more general strategy of dimensionality reduction, which seeks to map the input
data into a lower-dimensional space prior to running the supervised learning algorithm.

Noise in the output values

A fourth issue is the degree of noise in the desired output values (the supervisory target variables). If the
desired output values are often incorrect (because of human error or sensor errors), then the learning
algorithm should not attempt to find a function that exactly matches the training examples. Attempting to
fit the data too carefully leads to overfitting. You can overfit even when there are no measurement errors
(stochastic noise) if the function you are trying to learn is too complex for your learning model. In such a
situation, the part of the target function that cannot be modeled "corrupts" your training data - this
phenomenon has been called deterministic noise. When either type of noise is present, it is better to go
with a higher bias, lower variance estimator.

In practice, there are several approaches to alleviate noise in the output values such as early stopping to
prevent overfitting as well as detecting and removing the noisy training examples prior to training the
supervised learning algorithm. There are several algorithms that identify noisy training examples and
removing the suspected noisy training examples prior to training has decreased generalization error with
statistical significance.[4][5]

Other factors to consider

Other factors to consider when choosing and applying a learning algorithm include the following:

Heterogeneity of the data. If the feature vectors include features of many different kinds
(discrete, discrete ordered, counts, continuous values), some algorithms are easier to apply
than others. Many algorithms, including support-vector machines, linear regression, logistic
regression, neural networks, and nearest neighbor methods, require that the input features
be numerical and scaled to similar ranges (e.g., to the [-1,1] interval). Methods that employ
a distance function, such as nearest neighbor methods and support-vector machines with
Gaussian kernels, are particularly sensitive to this. An advantage of decision trees is that
they easily handle heterogeneous data.
Redundancy in the data. If the input features contain redundant information (e.g., highly
correlated features), some learning algorithms (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression,
and distance-based methods) will perform poorly because of numerical instabilities. These
problems can often be solved by imposing some form of regularization.
Presence of interactions and non-linearities. If each of the features makes an independent
contribution to the output, then algorithms based on linear functions (e.g., linear regression,
logistic regression, support-vector machines, naive Bayes) and distance functions (e.g.,
nearest neighbor methods, support-vector machines with Gaussian kernels) generally
perform well. However, if there are complex interactions among features, then algorithms
such as decision trees and neural networks work better, because they are specifically
designed to discover these interactions. Linear methods can also be applied, but the
engineer must manually specify the interactions when using them.
When considering a new application, the engineer can compare multiple learning algorithms and
experimentally determine which one works best on the problem at hand (see cross-validation). Tuning the
performance of a learning algorithm can be very time-consuming. Given fixed resources, it is often better
to spend more time collecting additional training data and more informative features than it is to spend
extra time tuning the learning algorithms.

Algorithms
The most widely used learning algorithms are:

Support-vector machines
Linear regression
Logistic regression
Naive Bayes
 Linear discriminant analysis
Decision trees
k-nearest neighbors algorithm
Neural networks (e.g., Multilayer perceptron)
Similarity learning

How supervised learning algorithms work

Given a set of training examples of the form such that is the feature
vector of the -th example and is its label (i.e., class), a learning algorithm seeks a function
, where is the input space and is the output space. The function is an element of some
space of possible functions , usually called the hypothesis space. It is sometimes convenient to
represent using a scoring function such that is defined as returning the value that
gives the highest score: . Let denote the space of scoring functions.

Although and can be any space of functions, many learning algorithms are probabilistic models
where takes the form of a conditional probability model , or takes the form

of a joint probability model . For example, naive Bayes and linear discriminant
analysis are joint probability models, whereas logistic regression is a conditional probability model.

There are two basic approaches to choosing or : empirical risk minimization and structural risk
[6]
minimization. Empirical risk minimization seeks the function that best fits the training data. Structural
risk minimization includes a penalty function that controls the bias/variance tradeoff.

In both cases, it is assumed that the training set consists of a sample of independent and identically
distributed pairs, . In order to measure how well a function fits the training data, a loss function
is defined. For training example , the loss of predicting the value is
.

The risk of function is defined as the expected loss of . This can be estimated from the training
data as

Empirical risk minimization

In empirical risk minimization, the supervised learning algorithm seeks the function that minimizes
. Hence, a supervised learning algorithm can be constructed by applying an optimization algorithm
to find .

When is a conditional probability distribution and the loss function is the negative log
likelihood: , then empirical risk minimization is equivalent to maximum
likelihood estimation.
When contains many candidate functions or the training set is not sufficiently large, empirical risk
minimization leads to high variance and poor generalization. The learning algorithm is able to memorize
the training examples without generalizing well (overfitting).

Structural risk minimization

Structural risk minimization seeks to prevent overfitting by incorporating a regularization penalty into the
optimization. The regularization penalty can be viewed as implementing a form of Occam's razor that
prefers simpler functions over more complex ones.

A wide variety of penalties have been employed that correspond to different definitions of complexity.
For example, consider the case where the function is a linear function of the form

A popular regularization penalty is , which is the squared Euclidean norm of the weights, also

known as the norm. Other norms include the norm, , and the "norm", which is the

number of non-zero s. The penalty will be denoted by .

The supervised learning optimization problem is to find the function that minimizes

The parameter controls the bias-variance tradeoff. When , this gives empirical risk minimization
with low bias and high variance. When is large, the learning algorithm will have high bias and low
variance. The value of can be chosen empirically via cross-validation.

The complexity penalty has a Bayesian interpretation as the negative log prior probability of ,
, in which case is the posterior probability of .

Generative training
The training methods described above are discriminative training methods, because they seek to find a
function that discriminates well between the different output values (see discriminative model). For the
special case where is a joint probability distribution and the loss function is the
negative log likelihood a risk minimization algorithm is said to perform generative

training, because can be regarded as a generative model that explains how the data were generated.
Generative training algorithms are often simpler and more computationally efficient than discriminative
training algorithms. In some cases, the solution can be computed in closed form as in naive Bayes and
linear discriminant analysis.

Generalizations
There are several ways in which the standard
supervised learning problem can be generalized:

Semi-supervised learning or weak

supervision: the desired output values are
provided only for a subset of the training
data. The remaining data is unlabeled or
imprecisely labeled.
Active learning: Instead of assuming that all
of the training examples are given at the
start, active learning algorithms interactively
collect new examples, typically by making
queries to a human user. Often, the queries
are based on unlabeled data, which is a Tendency for a task to employ supervised vs.
scenario that combines semi-supervised unsupervised methods. Task names straddling
learning with active learning. circle boundaries is intentional. It shows that the
classical division of imaginative tasks (left)
Structured prediction: When the desired
output value is a complex object, such as a employing unsupervised methods is blurred in
parse tree or a labeled graph, then standard today's learning schemes.
methods must be extended.
Learning to rank: When the input is a set of
objects and the desired output is a ranking of those objects, then again the standard
methods must be extended.

Approaches and algorithms

Analytical learning
Artificial neural network
Backpropagation
Boosting (meta-algorithm)
Bayesian statistics
Case-based reasoning
Decision tree learning
Inductive logic programming
Gaussian process regression
Genetic programming
Group method of data handling
Kernel estimators
Learning automata
Learning classifier systems
Learning vector quantization
 Minimum message length (decision trees, decision graphs, etc.)
Multilinear subspace learning
Naive Bayes classifier
Maximum entropy classifier
Conditional random field
Nearest neighbor algorithm
Probably approximately correct learning (PAC) learning
Ripple down rules, a knowledge acquisition methodology
Symbolic machine learning algorithms
Subsymbolic machine learning algorithms
Support vector machines
Minimum complexity machines (MCM)
Random forests
Ensembles of classifiers
Ordinal classification
Data pre-processing
Handling imbalanced datasets
Statistical relational learning
Proaftn, a multicriteria classification algorithm

Applications
Bioinformatics
Cheminformatics
Quantitative structure–activity relationship
Database marketing
Handwriting recognition
Information retrieval
Learning to rank
Information extraction
Object recognition in computer vision
Optical character recognition
Spam detection
Pattern recognition
Speech recognition
Supervised learning is a special case of downward causation in biological systems
Landform classification using satellite imagery[7]
Spend classification in procurement processes[8]

General issues
Computational learning theory
Inductive bias
 Overfitting
(Uncalibrated) class membership probabilities
Version spaces

See also
List of datasets for machine learning research
Unsupervised learning

References
1. Mehryar Mohri, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Ameet Talwalkar (2012) Foundations of Machine
Learning, The MIT Press ISBN 9780262018258.
2. S. Geman, E. Bienenstock, and R. Doursat (1992). Neural networks and the bias/variance
dilemma (http://delta-apache-vm.cs.tau.ac.il/~nin/Courses/NC06/VarbiasBiasGeman.pdf).
Neural Computation 4, 1–58.
3. G. James (2003) Variance and Bias for General Loss Functions, Machine Learning 51, 115-
135. (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/research/bv.pdf)
4. C.E. Brodely and M.A. Friedl (1999). Identifying and Eliminating Mislabeled Training
Instances, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 11, 131-167.
(http://jair.org/media/606/live-606-1803-jair.pdf)
5. M.R. Smith and T. Martinez (2011). "Improving Classification Accuracy by Identifying and
Removing Instances that Should Be Misclassified". Proceedings of International Joint
Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2011). pp. 2690–2697. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.221.1371
(https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.221.1371).
doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2011.6033571 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2FIJCNN.2011.6033571).
6. Vapnik, V. N. The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory (https://books.google.com/books?id=
EqgACAAAQBAJ&q=%22empirical+risk+minimization%22+OR+%22structural+risk+minimiz
ation%22) (2nd Ed.), Springer Verlag, 2000.
7. A. Maity (2016). "Supervised Classification of RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric Data for Different
Land Features". arXiv:1608.00501 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00501) [cs.CV (https://arxiv.or
g/archive/cs.CV)].
8. "Key Technologies for Agile Procurement | SIPMM Publications" (https://publication.sipmm.e
du.sg/key-technologies-agile-procurement/). publication.sipmm.edu.sg. 2020-10-09.
Retrieved 2022-06-16.

External links
Machine Learning Open Source Software (MLOSS) (http://www.mloss.org/)

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