What (who) is supervised - definition

Supervised learning (SL) is a machine learning paradigm for problems where the available data consists of labeled examples, meaning that each data point contains features (covariates) and an associated label. The goal of supervised learning algorithms is learning a function that maps feature vectors (inputs) to labels (output), based on example input-output pairs. It infers a function from labeled training data consisting of a set of training examples. In supervised learning, each example is a pair consisting of an input object (typically a vector) and a desired output value (also called the supervisory signal). A supervised learning algorithm analyzes the training data and produces an inferred function, which can be used for mapping new examples. An optimal scenario will allow for the algorithm to correctly determine the class labels for unseen instances. This requires the learning algorithm to generalize from the training data to unseen situations in a "reasonable" way (see inductive bias). This statistical quality of an algorithm is measured through the so-called generalization error.