Supervised Learning vs Unsupervised Learning

Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning

In supervised learning, the output data set are provided which are used to train the machine and get the desired outputs whereas in unsupervised learning no data set are provided, instead the data is clustered into different classes.

Face recognition:

• Supervised learning: Learn by examples as to what a face is in terms of structure, color, etc so that after several iterations it learns to define a face
• Unsupervised learning: Differentiate between horse, cat, or human face (clustering)

Fruit recognition:

Given a basket of different kinds of fruits (dataset)

• Supervised learning: you know there are apple, banana, grape, cherry in dataset. We know from our previous work shape of each fruit, so it is very easy to categorize them into groups
• Unsupevised learning: you don't know any of these fruits. You start with color, you will have 2 groups Red color: apple, cherry. Green color: banana, grape. Then you use size, you will have 4 groups: Red big: apple, Red small: cherry, Green big: banana, Green small: grape

Supervised learning:

• you get bunch of photos with informaton what is on them and you train a model to recognize new photos
• you have bunch of molecules and information which are drugs and you train a model to answer whether new molecule is also a drug

Unsupervised learning:

• you have bunch of photos of 6 people but without information who is on which one and want to divide this dataset into 6 piles, each with photos of one individual
• you have molecules, part of them are drugs and part are not but you do not know which are which and you want algorithm to discover the drugs

Resources:

- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-supervised-and-unsupervised-learning-algorithms/answer/Apoorv-Anand
- Excellent example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-supervised-and-unsupervised-learning-algorithms/answer/Saimadhu-Polamuri
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26182980/can-anyone-give-a-real-life-example-of-supervised-learning-and-unsupervised-lear