Can anyone give a real life example of supervised learning and unsupervised learning?

krupal picture krupal · Oct 3, 2014 · Viewed 81.6k times · Source

I recently studied about supervised learning and unsupervised learning. From theory, I know that supervised means getting the information from labeled datasets and unsupervised means clustering the data without any labels given.

But, the problem is I always get confused to identify whether the given example is supervised learning or unsupervised learning during my studies.

Can anyone please give a real life example?

Answer

lejlot picture lejlot · Oct 4, 2014

Supervised learning:

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

Unsupervised learning:

  • You have a bunch of photos of 6 people but without information about who is on which one and you want to divide this dataset into 6 piles, each with the 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 the algorithm to discover the drugs.