Types of Machine Learning Tasks/Problems

  • regression - predictor variable is scalar
  • classification - predictor variable is categorical
    • binary classification -
    • multi-ary classification -
      • sentiment classification -
  • ont-to-one -
  • one-to-many -
    • image captioning -
  • one-to-many -
  • many-to-many -
  • transcription - unstructured data to discrete textual form (e.g. Optical Character Recognition)
  • machine translation - sequence-to-sequence data
  • structured output - broad category that subsumes transcription and machine translation
  • anomaly detection - finds unusual data (e.g. credit card fraud)
  • synthesis & sampling - generate new examples similar to training examples (e.g. speech synthesis)
  • imputation of missing values - predict the values of missing entries
  • denoising - given corrupted example obtained an unknown corruption process from a clean example, predict the clean example. or more generally predict the conditional probability distribution 𝐏(clean example|corrupted example)
  • probability mass/density function estimation - learn the joint probability of training examples (can solve other tasks like imputation)